In this episode, Chip talks with Steve Guberman of Agency Outsight about coaching agency owners through problems that they universally face.

Steve shares insights into setting realistic expectations with clients, avoiding over-servicing, and adjusting scopes and pricing appropriately.

Key topics include continuous communication, team involvement in the sales process, and the value of postmortems to learn from both successes and failures.

Additionally, they discuss the benefits of asking questions, remaining curious, and leveraging referrals and testimonials for business growth.

With over 25 years in the creative, marketing, advertising, and public relations industry, including a decade spent running and eventually selling his own successful agency, Steve Guberman now channels his expertise into coaching agency owners. As the founder of Agency Outsight, Steve helps owners unearth their challenges, define their goals, and conquer them all, enabling them to build and run the agency of their dreams.

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, another expert in agency land, Steve Guberman of Agency Outsight. Welcome to the show, Steve.

Steve Guberman: Thanks Chip. Great to be here. Great to see you.

Chip Griffin: It is great to have you here. I’ve been a guest on your show, enjoyed it. And now we have a chance to flip the table around so I get to, to grill you and, and put you under the microscope. No, no, we’re just going to,

Steve Guberman: I haven’t been on this side of Riverside. So it’s pretty interesting.

Chip Griffin: Turns out it looks pretty much the same from, from both ends.

Steve Guberman: No surprises here.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. But, in any case, so Steve, why don’t you, before we jump into the conversation, why don’t you just share a little bit about yourself and Agency Outsight?

Steve Guberman: Yeah, I launched Agency Outsight, right before COVID. Just timing was actually pretty darn good, but.

 I’ve been in the agency space for 25 years. I owned my own agency, have been on both sides of, you know, an acquisition, grew my agency through an acquisition, exited through a sale, spent five years with the acquiring agency and so. Been through the rigmarole of all things agency life, more on the smaller side, I’ve never been part of the holding company, you know, life or anything like that.

 And now I help agency owners try and figure out what their goals are, what their challenges are, and how they can make their agency work better for them, get more out of their agency. And I do that through one on one coaching and group coaching and some kind of curriculum based programs here and there.

 So yeah, it’s, for me, it was born out of, I never want to have employees again, and, as much as I love the deliverable and the creative work and the process there, I just kind of felt like I needed a massive shift in what I was doing and how I can be more of service in my professional life, as I am in my personal life.

And full transparency, cause I’m a pretty open book. My family had kind of just gone through a really tragic experience right before COVID. I lost my daughter, unfortunately, very suddenly. And so came through, you know, the first part of that grief process, like I can’t be accountable for a job, but I know being of service is, is very cathartic.

And how can I help other people with whatever their challenges are? And so what I know so intimately and so well is running a business and running an agency and, you know, things like that. And so it kind of found my path back to revisiting life again, through that grief process in building a business.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, it, it is, and it’s certainly something that agency owners need, right? We know that from the conversations we have, they, they don’t have a lot of knowledge around running businesses. And, and so those of us who have been through the trenches before and, and have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly, you know, I always say that, that we can share.

 The wisdom of, of our success and, and the, the lessons from our failures so that hopefully they don’t repeat the exact same ones in the exact same way that we did them.

Steve Guberman: Yeah, they can kind of sidestep some of those landmines, but maybe they’ll find their own along the way and build their own experiences to share with others.

And, and you’re right. I think most creative professionals are accidental business owners. You know, they went to school for art or marketing or design or whatever. And now I find myself running a business and I don’t have a clue how to do that. And that was my experience also. So,

Chip Griffin: yeah. And I think, I think, you know, what you brought to the table here and explaining how you came to start your current business, I think that’s applicable to a lot of other agency owners as well, because, you know, everybody’s got their story and why they got started.

And so it, it might be that they don’t want to have employees anymore. They don’t want to be an employee anymore. It might be, you know, because of a, a personal situation of some kind. But whatever it is, there’s usually a driving force. And I always find that it’s helpful to understand what the motivations of the owners are to help them make better decisions for them.

Because at the end of the day, it’s your business. And if it’s not giving you what you need, then what’s the point? There’s a lot of other ways to be stressed out in this world. Yeah. Apart from running a business that you don’t like.

Steve Guberman: Yeah. Why are you doing it? And what are you hoping to get out of it? And how do you, how do you personalize that vision?

I think so many owners kind of do these copycat goals where it’s like, Oh, I saw this video and if I’m not making 30 K MMR, you know, I’m, I’m a failure or whatever. And it’s like, yeah, you really don’t need that. And that’s not your goal. Your goal is I don’t want to work Fridays and I want to spend time with my child and my, my spouse or, you know, something like that.

Or. You know, I like playing pickleball at lunchtime. Like, how do you build a business around the life that you want? As opposed to, I saw this TikTok that said, I’ve got to make, you know, seven figures within the first year or I stink. And it’s no, get that toxic mindset, throw it away.

Chip Griffin: But just follow a simple formula, Steve.

You just watch the YouTube video and you can figure out how to get the same rollback that that guy has.

Steve Guberman: Here’s my cookie cutter format on how you can get what I’ve got. And no, that doesn’t work. No. Yeah, it doesn’t work at all. That’s a big part of what I try and lean into is throw away the copycat goals and lean into what matters for you.

And, you know, Simon Sinek talks about the why. What, why are you doing what you’re doing and what do you hope to achieve? And whether that’s like, I can only see six months down the road or I have the ability to vision that, you know, three years down the road, how do we reverse engineer that into building a business that can work for you?

You know?

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, and I think, you know, one of the things that we were talking about, before we went on air was the, the, the idea of trying to figure out how you service your clients appropriately. And a lot of this comes back to, to that overall business mindset that you have. What kind of business are you building?

What are the goals for it? Typically part of that is, is generating a profit, right? Most of us are not doing this just to, to break even. Most of us run a business because we want to make a profit. And so I think one of the, the practical things that we might talk about today is how agency owners can better set themselves up for success with clients in, in how they’re staffing them and how they’re structuring them.

How do they avoid over servicing? I mean, I, I know that every single client I talk with, you know, worries about over servicing and, and inevitably they’ve got at least one client and probably many that they are currently over servicing. And so if, if you’ve got someone coming to you with this challenge, because I think it is universal.

Sure. How do you counsel them to get through that? What are the things that they need to be thinking about in order to make sure that they are not over servicing?

Steve Guberman: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s a super common challenge. I can remember vividly when I had my agency, like, we would finish up a website, we’d do a post mortem, and be like, wow, we just lost a ton of money.

Why did we spend, you know, 30 hours building a nav system instead of using a plug in? Like, how do we optimize what we’re putting into a product or a service, still get really good results, but not spend too much time? I think it starts with like understanding what your client’s needs are and not selling them what you want them to have, but selling them on what their needs are, what the solutions to their challenges are. And then really being granular in what your, what your costs are and what your prices are.

So if I know it’s going to take me, you know, whatever, 300 hours to build this solution for them, how much is that going to cost me and how do I make sure that I’ve broken down every line item of, you know, account management, project management, web development, research, testing, et cetera. So I don’t, you know, have all these holes in the project where money’s just going out the window.

 It’s, it’s a long process, I think, to be able to refine that and know where the holes are, where I’m losing money. There’s got to be a review process at the end. And then somebody has got to be tracking it throughout the course of the retainer or the project to say, hey, we’re at 50 percent of our budget. We need to put the brakes on and throttle it back.

I do think that there are, Hmm, this might be controversial, but there, there are certainly ways and reasons to over service the account, whether it’s on the account management side and bringing that kind of, over servicing feel to a client so that they feel super taken care of.

But I think in the execution or the deliverabilities or whatever you want to call the production side of it, that can certainly be reined in big time and, and costs need to be throttled back and, you know, building profit into what we’re selling is vital. And I don’t think a lot of people do that.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a great point that, I mean, there, you can strategically over service.

Right. And that’s fine. The vast majority of

Or give the appearance of strategically over servicing. Yeah.

Right. Exactly. Right. You, you, you can’t say, we’re intentionally over servicing you just to kind of wow you, you know? Right. But, but it, but it has to be part of your plan to do that and usually it means that you’re making up that margin somewhere else.

 In the business or in the project or with the client or something, but it, it’s intentional. I think the, the problem is that most over servicing is very much unintentional. And that’s where you get into problems. And I, so I’d like to, to go back to the first building block that you talked about, which was selling the client what they actually need versus what you want to sell them.

And I think that this, getting the expectations aligned at the start of the agency client relationship is probably the most important thing. In fact, when I’m asked, how do I improve retention of my clients, I say it goes to even before they sign the contract. They have to be aligned on expectations. So how do you…

And clients are awful at this, in my experience, prospects, they will typically say, you know, I need a website or I need a PR campaign or, you know, and it’s very tactical oftentimes in what they come to you with. How do you tease out of them? How do you get to that root cause of the engagement that can help you to get those expectations better aligned?

Steve Guberman: I think just, we got to ask a lot more questions. Be super curious from the beginning. I, so I think that does two things. One is it really susses out what their true needs are, as opposed to them coming to the agency with, here’s my solution that I need, right? You don’t want, you, you wouldn’t go to the doctor and say, Well, maybe somebody would, but you wouldn’t want to go to the doctor and be like, here’s what’s wrong with me.

Prescribe me, you know, with this. Same scenario. So keep, keep asking questions to suss out really what their challenges are, not what their, and what their goals are, but not what the solutions that they think they need are. And so by being curious, you’re able to also talk about money, which so many creative professionals stink at, frankly.

And so, Oh, cool. I need a website. Yeah, we can do that. It’s gonna be $10,000. You have no idea what this website needs to do, what their goals are, what their – you know, is it ecommerce like a million things you need to understand before you can put a budget to it. And I think putting the cart before the horse with the budget and saying, yeah, we can do it for X amount and the client’s, Oh, but I also need it to do this and this and this. Now I can’t increase that budget cause I’ve already committed, you know, so a lot of that ties to not knowing how to manage scope, not knowing how to price scope.

Not knowing how to pull budgets out of clients. And there’s always that, you know, Oh, I don’t know what my budget is. Tell me what it’s going to cost. And so there’s the whole strategy behind how to handle that as well. But I just think being curious, continue to ask questions. I can remember going into prospect meetings and walking out and be like, Oh, we, we nailed that.

We a hundred percent have this, but we didn’t know what we had or how much it was going to cost or how long it was going to take or what we were actually selling, but the relationship was forming and it was just a really good feeling behind it. But it can’t be that one and done close. It’s got to be a lot of conversation, a lot of exploratory, how many other stakeholders need to come to the table to really talk about what does success look like and what does failure look like, frankly, and, you know, talking about all these aspects of the relationship and not just the scope work.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, I, I love asking questions. I mean, frankly, curiosity is one of the biggest assets you can have as an entrepreneur anyway, right? Yeah. So, so just having it generally, but certainly at the start of a client relationship, where you’re trying to figure out what they really need. You know, I, I mean, I think that agencies spend way too much time talking about themselves, what they know, what they can do, what they’ve done.

Yep. I mean, I, I think I’ve, you know, one of my controversial takes is that agencies should burn their creds decks. If, if there was never another cred deck ever handed out, I think that would be the best thing in the world. Because you typically end up going into, and I’ve been on both sides of agency pitches.

I’ve been in some large agency pitches where we’re sitting there, we bring in like 15, 20 people and we just talk for two hours. Like stop, ask questions, learn. And I think that does help you get to that, that better scope. But now, now that you’ve figured it out. That next step then is you have to memorialize that scope, you have to put it into something where you’re actually able to frame, you know, not boxing yourself in too much because you do want flexibility as you grow with the client to, to adapt, but, but how do you, how do you structure a scope that helps you win the business, but also puts the guardrails in place?

In such a way that you can hopefully manage that scope effectively going forward.

Steve Guberman: The win the business part I think is interesting because there shouldn’t be any surprises when I’m presenting. And I specifically say presenting as opposed to sending a proposal or scope or whatever. There shouldn’t be any surprises.

Hey client, as we talked about, this thing is going to be X dollars. It’s going to take us X amount of time to do it. The team that’s going to do it is Susan and Frank and Sherry and blah, blah, blah. And so there shouldn’t be any surprises. I think the other vital part of the winning part is don’t drag your feet on it.

Too many owners are responsible for their scopes and their, and their contracts. And when you talk to them, you’re like, Oh, I got to get this, this proposal out. It’s late. Or, you know, I’m down to the 11th hour. I’ve got to get this scope done. Get it done quicker because the longer you delay the quick, you know, that client has so many other things on their mind.

The last thing they’re doing is sitting there looking at their watch, waiting for, you know, John to deliver a proposal. So timeliness is essential in the winning factor.

Chip Griffin: Well, and the owners shouldn’t be taking on the whole scoping thing themselves anyway.

Steve Guberman: That’s another topic altogether, right?

Chip Griffin: Well, yeah, but, but, but actually I think it goes very directly to how you manage scope properly.

Yeah. Because part of the problem is that owners do a lot of the sales themselves. And I, I, I think owners fundamentally need to be involved in small agencies. They need to be involved in the sales process. So I think anyone who tells you you can pull yourself out of sales entirely as an owner. You’ve either got a really weird structure going on, which great kudos to you, or it’s just not going to work.

Right. But you need to have the people who are actually the account leads, the people who are doing the day to day work in those prospect meetings because they can, first of all, they’ll shoulder the burden of putting together the scope, but they’ll also be able to highlight where the scope is not realistic or where the pricing is not realistic.

And they’re, they’re then having ownership over it, which helps you to manage the scope later. So there’s so many benefits to having more of the team involved in the sales process.

Steve Guberman: I’ll do some of these, kind of all hands agency meetings to kind of suss out what’s going on. What are the challenges?

You know, why are, you know, why is the delivery team annoyed with the owner or the management? It’s like, well, they, they overpromised this and we got to get it done in it. And it’s like, all right, here’s a quick fix before you send something out, your team needs to be a part of that. Exactly like you’re saying, process.

Am I budgeting too little or too much for it? Am I scoping too little or too much, too much time for it? Where’s this going to fit in, in my resourcing and my production schedule? You know, we’re, we’re committing to this for Q1. Do we have the, the, the human power for it in Q1? All of that to your point is there shouldn’t be any surprises.

So if my production team is part of understanding, what is it going to take to deliver success? Can they actually get it done in the time that I’ve committed? And is the budget the right amount that we’ve committed to? So yeah, I think having, you know, whether it’s management or the actual production team, where somebody that’s part of the delivery, process in an agency part of it is essential. It, it avoids a lot of internal, I can’t believe they’re there, you know, we’ve got to get this done in five hours. We don’t have, there’s no way we can get this done in five hours. What were they thinking? You know, that kind of thought process.

And so you help avoid some disgruntled ness, but.

Chip Griffin: And if you’re going to get pushback from your team, get it before the deal is signed so you can hash it out. And maybe they’re being unreasonable. Sometimes team members are like, Oh yeah, I need 20 hours to do this. And you’re like, seriously, I mean, this is a simple thing.

Like, can we, can we re scope it ourselves so that we can get it done more timely. But, but solve that problem before it becomes a major issue with the client. So that the partner to putting together a good scope is obviously putting together the right price. Yeah. Because over servicing matters a whole lot less if you’ve got, you know, really comfortable margins.

 But most agencies don’t have particularly comfortable margins because they’re not great at pricing. So how do you get better at pricing the scope of work that you’re actually giving to the client?

Steve Guberman: That’s a good one also. So I, I think a lot of it comes down to a few aspects. One is knowing your costs.

So many agency owners don’t know what it costs to deliver something, to get something done, to turn the lights on each day. Like, what are my recurring. What’s my software stack cost me? It’s an easy fix, like, Oh, cool. Pull up my credit card statement or get my bookkeeper to run, run me a report. What is it, what is each aspect of this project or scope of work going to cost me to do?

 And then quite simply add 30, 40, whatever percentage is in that plan of what you want to profit. But knowing what things cost them and then using a system, I’m a big fan of time tracking. I’m a big fan of keeping reports. Looking back at historic data and saying, last time we did a project like this we said it was going to cost 10, but it really cost us 15 grand and we lost money on it.

How do we avoid that? Well, we can reuse some assets we built on previous projects. Cool, like that’ll save us some time. We can charge more because we obviously didn’t charge enough. So, historical data I think is vital and there are, there are more and more smarter systems like, you know, for years, you know, I use Harvest, in my agency.

I use it. I use it now. I’ve been using Harvest probably 15, 16 years and I absolutely love it. But I don’t, there are, there are other tools that are leveraging AI to be able to say, here’s what your historic data looks like and here’s how you can better scope things. And, you know, quote unquote, smart projects of scoping and budgeting of, you know, last time we did a project of this size and with these features, it cost us X.

So, owners need to know their numbers and it, it continues to surprise me slash not surprise me that so many don’t know their numbers. What does it cost to do a thing?

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and, and the time tracking is absolutely essential to that. Yeah. And I, I know that it’s sort of the, the hip thing for people to say, well, you shouldn’t, you know, don’t do timesheets in your agent.

We don’t do timesheets. Well, I mean, that’s, that’s sort of like a restaurant not knowing what their food costs are.

Steve Guberman: Exactly.

Chip Griffin: It makes no sense. The largest cost in virtually any agency is your labor costs. If you don’t know what that labor cost is for executing a project, how on earth can you price it?

And by the way, the answer is not this value pricing thing that people love to talk about. I think value pricing is the biggest scam in the world because the vast majority of people do not understand value pricing correctly. And even those who do understand it probably can’t execute it all that effectively.

So, you know, it’s not, it’s not the solution. The solution is you need to know what your costs are. Because then you at least have a floor where you know where you can’t mess up.

Steve Guberman: Yeah. And then charge accordingly. But then also hold your team, your team’s feet to the fire, whether with, with a good project manager and or a good project management system and say, cool, we’re going to break this project down internally and say, we’ve got, you know, 5 percent time for project management, 10 percent time for writing, 20 percent time for design.

Like. Yeah. And then say, Hey, you said you were going to get it done this amount of time. What’s going on that we’re missing that mark and we’re going to go over budget. The other thing I think that most agencies miss is again, what I said before, going back to a client saying, Hey, you said that your budget was 10 K and here’s what we scoped, and now you want more features. That’s going to be more money, you know, it’s akin to building a house or going to the grocery store, anytime you want to add something to the, the shopping cart or the, whatever the budget’s going to go up.

Why do agency owners have such a hard time with that? It’s, it’s mind boggling. So,

Chip Griffin: Well, I mean, I think a piece of it is the people are, they’re afraid to upset the client and afraid that they’re going to lose a revenue stream, right? I mean, I think that’s, that’s where fear is a huge driver of decision making, in any small business, but particularly in agencies where it is, you know, there’s a lot more gray area in what you’ve done, right?

It’s not, you know, we’re not delivering a specific widget. And so did I get the widget or not? And, and so there are, you know, there are some, there are qualitative aspects to it that do make it a little bit more challenging.

So let’s, let’s think about, you know, how we’re managing this scope. And, and, and I agree with pushing back on the clients, but one of the things, one of the challenges I think agencies have is figuring out what to push back on and what not to. Because, because there’s a fine line between feeling as a client, like you’re being nickeled and dimed because of every little thing. Well, that’s technically not in, but yeah, but it’s just, it’s swinging one hammer on one nail, that’s it.

But if you keep swinging hammers on nails, that adds up. So how do you, how do you as an owner and how do you talk with your team about managing this in such a way that you strike that right balance to keep you within scope, but not irritate the heck out of the client?

Steve Guberman: Yeah, I think some of it is like you’re saying, like, Hey, we’re just gonna, let’s just do it, do it quick and let’s get it done.

 In some cases, I think it’s okay to tell the client, Hey, this thing ended up being more time. We’re not going to charge you out of scope for it, but I just want to let you know in the vein of a transparent relationship that we’re trying to build long term. We’re going to kind of just take one on the chin for you and we’re going to get this thing done for you.

And I think that this is an important thing for the sake of account management and relationship building. And in other cases where it is detrimental, where it’s going to really eat into that 30, 40 percent profit that you built into it. Now we’ve got to have a conversation with the client. Where when it’s on the agency’s onus that we misscoped something, we can take more of the, you know, on the chin of it. Where the client keeps asking and asking and asking.

At some point it’s got to be like, You’re really, you know, you’re, you’re asking for far more than what we scoped for. We can do this one, whatever photo edit, but you want 50 photo edits. That’s, that’s a lot of time that we just didn’t scope for. So, you know, understanding where you can kind of let things slip a little bit verse where it’s really going to eat into the overall loss of a project and balancing client satisfaction.

Do I just want to get this done? Cause this client is one and done and they’re a pain in the butt. I never want to work with them again. Or, this can lead to, you know, a billion dollar company, you know, infiltrating three departments in the same company. I’m gonna go over and above and if we take a loss, it’s, you know, a lost leader, frankly.

So, right, just knowing what the opportunities are versus charging for every little thing, because you’re right. You don’t want to nickel and dime a client. That’s a real quick way to lose a client.

Chip Griffin: Right. Well, and I think one of the things you’ve touched on there too is, is the importance of, you know, understanding whose responsibility it was that, that something was not in the scope, right?

If, if you didn’t include it and you should have, then yeah, I think you do have to shoulder more of the burden there because you can’t expect that the client is going to know. It’s, it’s sort of like, you know, if I told you what the cost of a surgery is and I forget to include the anesthesia, okay. I mean, I, I certainly can’t, you know, cut into you without putting you under, but you know, I didn’t tell you about it.

So, you know, we got to somehow solve this without just sticking you with an extra bill, because it was on me not to tell you. But I think one of the things you can do is learn from the, if you’ve got an, an engagement where you’re constantly being out of scope and you feel like you constantly need to either waive being out of scope or talk to the client about it, that probably means you didn’t scope it effectively to begin with.

And so I think the, the last piece of, of scope management is how do you review the work that you’ve done so that you can take lessons away from it? And whether that’s a project where you evaluate at the end. Or it’s an ongoing relationship and you periodically need to review it so that you don’t get so far down the, the path that it’s hard to correct.

So how do you counsel your clients to work through that evaluation process? To learn lessons from the past and try not to repeat them.

Steve Guberman: Postmortems are vital. You can only really learn from your own mistakes or mistakes of others and, or your successes, frankly. And so not, not every postmortem is a, man, we really screwed up on this one.

It’s like, Hey, we crushed it. And so building a true process for what a postmortem looks like internally and with your client partners is vital. And you’re right, whether it’s at the end of a project. Hey, we just launched your website. Love to, you know, grab a half an hour to talk to you about what worked and what didn’t work.

Clients are more than willing, unless you really burned it down, they’re more than willing to spend time with an agency to talk about how they, how they, made them look good, what went right for them, what they can improve later, you know, again, unless you really burned it down, they don’t ever want to speak to you again, then there’s bigger problems, but by and large, they’re more than willing to.

And if you build that in from the start of the relationship, here’s how we do account management. Here’s how we do check ins. Here’s how we communicate. Here’s, you know, how we

deliver, you know, work to review. And here’s how we want feedback. And by the way, at the end of the project, we’re at various milestones. We’re going to check in with you for some feedback. I’m going to ask you six questions that we’ve pre formulized. Formulated, whoever that word might be. So yeah, project work, vital. Retainer work, even more vital. And not just, Oh, we’re up for a contract renew.

We want to check in and see how we’re doing, but like quarterly, periodically have a launch, build that relationship. Don’t talk about work during launch. Like do the things that give them the opportunity to say. Hey, Susan on your team is really dropping the ball on her deliverables, just wanted to let you know.

Don’t want to raise a big stink about it, but I know you run the, the account team, or you run the copy team, or whatever. And like, by building those candid relationships, it gives a client the ability to say, you know, something that’s on their mind. You know, and so, building in those formal, internally it can be formal, from the client’s perspective, it’s just like, Oh, that was so nice, agency so and so brought me out for lunch just to talk about my kid’s t ball game.

No, we, we wanted more than that. And it was strategic, but I do think, you know, don’t send out a jot form and say, fill out these five questions. Like have a conversation ideally in person, but with so much of the world being remote, zoom is fine too, you know, and know what you want to ask and what you strategically need to get back from the client for future success for them and for other clients.

But then also do it internally, like, ask candidly, Hey, did we scope this wrong? What could we have done better differently? Did we need more time than we scoped for? Did we not have the resources, resources for it? As an owner, I was guilty of that a lot. Over promising. Over promising on timeline. Hey guys, there’s no reason you can’t get this done before lunch on Friday.

Boss, this is going to take a hundred hours or, you know, whatever it was, like not understanding what the true needs from my team were. And so having those internal conversations. Away from the computers, go sit at a coffee shop or sit in the conference room or whatever and have a candid conversation because if it keeps happening, it’s going to lead to poor client or poor client retention, poor team retention, like just the challenges will continue to pile up.

So yeah, postmortems are vital.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and I think, I think just like you started the process with asking questions, being curious, I think that’s how you need to end the process too. You need to, to ask those questions and be curious with the client. With your team, you need to, particularly with your team, you need to avoid coming in with judgment.

You need to, you need to really understand, well, why did it take us longer? Why did we have this particular challenge? What could we do better? As opposed to saying you went over budget by this. And so we didn’t hit our numbers and that’s going to be a problem. We need to do better the next time. No. I mean, that, that may be the net result that you end up getting to, but you need to start by asking the questions and listening, because what you think may be able to be done over lunch may really take five or 10 hours. Because particularly as we spend more time at higher levels in the business, we get disconnected from it.

We also remember how we did things and it may not be the same way that the team is able to do it. One of the reasons you become an owner is typically because you excelled. So you can do things often quicker or better than your team members, or at least that’s what you think. And so, you know, you need to be cautious of that.

So I love that we’re starting with curiosity, ending with curiosity. And it’s, it’s sort of, I mean, that’s the whole reason why I do these podcasts, right? It’s, I’m, I’m curious. I’m curious.

Steve Guberman: Yeah. I’ll throw in another, I think, tip that a lot of clients will ask, when’s the right time to ask for a referral or a testimonial?

And I think it’s on the tail end of that postmortem. So asking for a client feedback reinforces to, if, if you did a good job, preface it with that. Reinforces to them by hearing them say, you guys, your team really crushed it, your copywriter was super creative, the designs were really surprising. So it reinforces to them how good of a job you did because it’s been a six month process.

They might not spend the days thinking about how great you were at the kickoff or your initial designs and so it helps them kind of rehash the overall process. Hey, awesome. I’m so happy you, you were pleased. Hey, can you put that in a testimonial for us? Or, I saw on LinkedIn you’re connected with, you know, Joan Smith.

You think maybe you can introduce us, because now they’re, they just sang you praises. Right. Of course they’re going to introduce you to their whatever that they know. So it’s, it’s a really good time to build that into your process and workshop how do you ask for that testimonial or that referral in a positive postmortem.

Chip Griffin: And referrals are a whole other thread that we could follow. Totally. And so we’ll have to come back and have that conversation at some point because I, another one of the things that I say that’s controversial is that, People who complain about referrals as being a bad growth driver for it. I think they’re nuts.

I think referrals are your best way of growing and you just need to figure out how to do them effectively, how to get them effectively. So maybe we can talk about that another time. But I, unfortunately we are drawing to a close the amount of time that we have for today’s episode. Steve, if, if people want to learn more about you, want to get in touch, where could they go?

Steve Guberman: Look up, on LinkedIn, my whatever tag is agencycoach. I grabbed that. I was surprised you didn’t grab it before me, but, agencyoutsight.com also.

Chip Griffin: Excellent. And we will include that in the show notes as well. So, If you’re on the treadmill or in the car or something like that, and you didn’t have a chance to write it down, just click back on the show notes and you’ll be able to find that.

So Steve, it’s been great having this conversation with you. And I look forward to having you back again in the future, because I’m sure we have lots of, of things that we can discuss, lots of controversial things that we can say, and hopefully some practical tips that we can continue to dole out. So again, my guest has been Steve Guberman of Agency Outsight.

Thanks for joining us.

Steve Guberman: Thanks Chip.