Should your agency hire specialists, generalists, or fractional team members?

Chip and Gini recently spoke about the challenge of small agencies seeking to hire unicorns who excel at everything. In this episode, they look at when you should be looking for specific kinds of hires and whether they should be specialists, generalists, or fractional support.

Knowing the level of expertise needed and understanding how much demand your agency will have for their time helps you to make a smarter decision about how to obtain the resources needed to serve clients and manage your business.

In some cases, you may want to hire a contractor with specific skills that you require but not with enough volume or consistency to justify hiring in-house. For those positions you do choose to fill with part- or full-time employees, you need to decide what level of expertise in which skills will give you the best value and help to meet your specific requirements.

Key takeaways

* Chip Griffin: “Nobody likes time tracking. But time tracking is your friend when it comes to hiring.”

* Gini Dietrich: “Look at your agency and you say, this is our point of differentiation, this is how we’re different. And this is the process that we use every time, no matter what. How do you fill in those things with your employees or your contractors?”

* Chip Griffin: “If you have less than a hundred employees, 150 employees, you don’t need a CFO.”

* Gini Dietrich: “That’s my job now is that I build that team, that bench.”

Related

* Fractional C-level help for agencies

* CWC 25: Patrick Rogan on HR for small-to-midsize agencies

* Are you trying to hire unicorns for your agency?

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: Gini, I feel like I’m only part of myself today. Oh boy. Right after this.

So last week we talked about unicorns.

Gini Dietrich: We did.

Chip Griffin: And if you, if you didn’t hear that episode, you should certainly go back and listen to that because I mean, how often do you get to hear particularly me talking about unicorns.

Gini Dietrich: The only thing that could have been better is if I’d had glitter and I’d like thrown it up in the screen around your face.

Shoot. I missed that opportunity.

Chip Griffin: Fortunately that would not come through the camera, so.

Gini Dietrich: No, but it would show. It would be lovely. It would be pink. I would make sure. Of course. I missed that opportunity. Shoot. Well. Another time.

Chip Griffin: Somehow our viewers will have to live without that. And most of you are just listening to us anyway.

So you don’t even get to see it. That’s fair. That’s true. Yeah. That’s fair. But, but as part of that conversation, you know, we were talking about how agency owners want to find employees ...