In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss the importance of having a clear vision for where an agency is headed while also acknowledging the need for strong operational skills.

They explore different types of agency owners, from visionaries to those who excel in operational management, and emphasize the necessity of balancing these roles within a team. The duo highlights the importance of complementing one’s weaknesses by hiring the right people, whether it involves bringing in operational expertise or visionary ideas. They also share personal anecdotes and practical advice on maintaining this balance for the long-term success of an agency.

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 Gini, I’m having a vision. I see something.

Gini Dietrich: What do you see? Dead people?

Chip Griffin: No, I’m not that harsh today. No, I, that was not the greatest introduction probably, but you know, hey, that’s par for the course.

But what we’re gonna talk about today is when you do or don’t have a vision for where your agency is headed and your vision for what you can do and all of that. And I think there are different kinds of agency owners, some who have a vision or idea, big ideas, that kind of thing. And, and others who are a little bit more, let’s say, workmanlike. And, you know, they can execute really well and, you know, they want to keep growing, but they don’t consider themselves a, a big picture, visionary type.

And, and both can be successful, but I think there are things that both kinds of owners need to be aware of and thinking about.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I totally agree. And you know, I think we, I think there’s so much focus just generally on you need to be visionary. You need to be strategic. You need to think about, you know, where the, the business is going.

And there’s something to be said for people who are operationally focused. I am not one of them, and that’s, it’s not my strong suit and I really wish that I had some of those skills because I think I, I would’ve grown my business a lot faster and a lot less expensively than I have if I had that skill set.

So I think there’s something to be said for people who like know how to manage their business financially, know how to manage their balance, their balance sheet, know how to like run it like a tight ship versus people like me who are like, oh, what if we tried this? And there’s no process, there’s no standard operating procedure.

I imagine I’m really hard to work for because of that.

Chip Griffin: I, I would imagine. Mm-hmm. Yeah. But, but you, you are sort of, I mean, you are a, a visionary owner almost in the extreme, right. You, you created a whole new way of doing marketing and PR that the rest of the industry is following. Yeah. So, I mean, you can’t be much more of a visionary than that.

And, but that said. Not every agency owner is that, nor do you actually need that,

Gini Dietrich: nor should they be,

Chip Griffin: in order to be successful, everybody has to kind of find their lane and figure out how to be successful. And, and to your point, you also recognize where your weaknesses are and that is on the operational side.

And so I think, you know, regardless of what kind of owner you are, you need to try to augment that. And fill in the gaps that are left by your weaknesses. So you would obviously need people on your team who are much stronger on the operational side of things. If you are an owner who is a really good manager and, and business builder and those kinds of things, you may need someone who has at least enough vision for the, the client’s needs.

Maybe not, you know, huge vision for, you know, where the industry is headed or something like that, but who can at least, you know, supplement the, you know, what you have for expertise. With a little bit more of that, you know, pushing the envelope on vision. So you’ve gotta really balance it in order to have success.

Gini Dietrich: Right. I, before we started, we hit record on this. We were talking about how like in, in your businesses, you, you had somebody who was sort of the out there talking to people, salesperson, and then you are back in behind the scenes doing the work. I think you need that give and take a little bit because.

Not, not everybody has the same, you can’t be a visionary and an operations person. It’s pretty rare, right? So how do you bring in somebody to help you where you’re, you’re, you’re weak. And I don’t necessarily know that it has to be a partner, a business partner. You know, I think I can think of lots of organizations.

MarketingProfs is one, one where Ann Handley is the, the visionary. She’s the one out there. She’s the face, she’s the one building the brand and all that. But she’s not an owner. Of MarketingProfs. So, you know, thinking about those kinds of people who can supplement where you’re weak is a real, is a really smart thing to do.

And to your point, I don’t think that you have to be a visionary as long as you have somebody who’s on your team, who’s willing to be out there, and who’s willing to be the face of the company.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, I, I would agree. It absolutely does not have to be another owner. In fact, there’s, there’s benefits to it not being someone who has an ownership stake in the business because it, it gives you a little bit more flexibility, right?

You can, yep. You can, it, it can work, work really well as it did for me with one of my businesses years ago where we did have that sort of, that balance in the partnership and, and how we approach things. But you know, I also, you know, later in my career, I sort of became the non-operational person and the, the person out there pushing the envelope. And, and I’ve had, you know, people who worked for me who were sort of, you know, in fact one of ’em described it as, as he was sort of the rubber band that kind of kept pulling me back so that I didn’t get too far, off center, if you will, with some of my ideas.

I love it.

And, and, I think that rubber band is actually a great analogy. Right.

Gini Dietrich: That’s a great analogy.

Chip Griffin: You know, you kind of, you, you wanna stretch a little bit in both directions, right? If you str- you know, stretch operationally. Then that helps you from a profitability standpoint and you know, and results standpoint because you can kind of be more repeatable in the results you’re producing.

On the other hand, you want someone who’s pushing the envelope on figuring out, you know. Where are we headed? You know? Mm-hmm. What does AI mean for us? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. How is the, how is the world of PR and marketing changing and, and how can we apply new ideas and fresh thinking to that? So, so having both of those, but making sure that neither one gets too far away from the other.

So that rubber band is really a great example because at some point’s that rubber band starts to pull you back in. That’s great. And if you push too hard, you snap the rubber brand and that’s not helpful.

Gini Dietrich: Yep. That’s a really great analogy and a really great way of thinking about it. This reminds me of, when I left Fleischman Hillard, after doing PR for many years, I went to an ad agency to build their PR department. And I had, it was me and one other guy, and he was my boss. So he was like the PR director and, it was our job to build the PR department for this ad agency. And he and I would sit in meetings and he would come up with all of these great ideas for the client.

He’d be like, and we can do this, and we can do this. And he would get to the point where he’d be saying great ideas. I mean, phenomenal ideas. He was a great idea person, but nothing that we could execute ’cause we didn’t have the resources, we didn’t have the capacity, we didn’t have the budgets, all that kinda stuff.

So I would literally kick him under the table to make him that I was his rubber band. I was bringing him back to make him like, oh, that’s not something we could do. It’s to, to sort of bring him back and we would position ourselves at, in a conference room table and a, at a conference room table in a client’s office so that I had the ability to kick him.

Where the client wouldn’t know that, so that I could bring him back to reality a little bit, because he would say stuff that we just couldn’t do. And then when we’d go back to the office and I’d be like, dude, we can’t do that. So, right. So I was his rubber band a little bit. So I, you know, there are, there ways that I think you can think about it to help you understand like…

you can have a great idea person, but you also have to, to fill in, like within these parameters. Don’t come up with these great ideas that are gonna cost the client $20 million when you have a budget of 500,000. Right? So it was that kind of stuff. So I love that rubber band analogy. Because you can start, start to think about, all right, let’s pull in either direction to make it work.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. See, I, I wish I had thought of the, the kicking approach with my business partner years ago because that, that would’ve been helpful. Because we had a lot of those same kinds of meetings, you know, where he would be saying all these, you know, lovely things that, that we’d be able to do. And, and I’m just looking at ’em like, are you crazy?

Why are you’re out of your mind promising these. Things, right.

Gini Dietrich: Uhhuh

Chip Griffin: And, and it got to be sort of a, a joke because he would almost kind of look at me and, and not quite wink, but there was the twinkle in his eye a after he was finished talking, that he knew what he had done. And so afterwards I’d be like, why the bleep did you promise all those things and that timeline and all that, we can’t do that.

He said, you’ll figure it out. And unfortunately, most of the time I did.

You did. Sure.

So, you know, victim of your own success sometimes uhhuh on that.

But I, I think the other, the other thing to to remember is that you, you don’t have to be in one lane for your entire career. Just as I was the more operational person at that point.

Over the years, I have become much more of the, the stretchy part of the rubber band, you know, on the visionary side. And over the course of our careers, we will evolve. And the things that we enjoy doing, I mean, I know a number of agency owners who love the, the planning and implementation and, you know, having the forecasts and, you know, pulling everything together and, and all that.

I mean, that is a very different kind of owner than someone perhaps like you who’s out there and like saying, let’s, let’s just completely rewire the whole industry. Forget it. Let’s just throw out, you know, a hundred years of thinking and we’re gonna do something totally different. And it worked for you, so you can’t question it.

But, it it is something where, you know, we will all have things that we, that are of interest to us today that maybe 20 years from now we’ll think differently.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely. I mean, I think about it from this perspective too, like when social media became available for businesses. We all spent time on it, right?

And we were all trying to figure out like, what’s the strategy? How do we use it? How do we help it grow our businesses? How does it help us build our brands? Now you could not pay me enough money to sit on social media all day. Like that’s just, I’ve grown out of that and now I understand how to use it and right?

And I need to pay somebody to do that work. So it’s the same kind of thing. You may very well, 10 years ago have been really good at one thing and now you’ve grown into something else, and that’s totally normal, right? That’s what you should be doing. So don’t beat yourself up. And the other thing on, on the visionary standpoint is if you don’t feel like you’re, you’re a visionary person, I, I like for you to sort of look at your business and go, what do we do really well?

And what do we do that’s different? And when we’re talking to prospects, what do they say is the most annoying thing about their previous agency and how do we fix that? And when we talk to clients, what do they say that that we do really well? Or what do they compliment us on all the time? That’s not necessarily visionary from the perspective of I’m changing the entire industry, but it’s visionary from the perspective of I’m taking what we do really well and pushing our clients’ businesses forward in a way that other agencies can’t do that.

So you don’t have to be like, Oh my gosh. Let’s look at how this whole industry operates and change it. But, but really look at it from the perspective of how do we do what we do and how do we do it so that we’re helping our clients as businesses succeed? That’s, that’s visionary and I think that’s a really easy way to sort of stair step into what we’re talking about here.

Chip Griffin: Absolutely. And, I think that some agency owners worry that they don’t have enough of the the big idea vision and that they need to have that in order to win business from clients. And I, I think the reality is that most of you don’t need to be thinking that big in order to win a strong amount of business,

Gini Dietrich: right.

Chip Griffin: For your agency. And so, you know, you need to be, and, and we go to, I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of, of agency websites or marketing materials where they, they try to make it sound like they’re, they’re doing something entirely new. And in fact they’re basically doing the same thing as everybody else.

They just are trying to frame it in, you know, some magical way. And, and I don’t think you need to do that because ultimately that’s not what clients care about. Clients care about what are the, what’s the work you can do for me? What are the results it’s gonna produce and how much does it cost? Apart from that, they don’t really care that, I mean, even, I would imagine for many of your clients, they don’t care that you invented the PESO model.

They just care about what you’re proposing to do for them. And is it producing results that help grow their own businesses?

Gini Dietrich: That’s right. And the other other thing I’d add to that is whether or not you, they will enjoy coming to meetings with you because if they don’t like you and there’s no chemistry, and they stop coming to meetings, the relationship will sour.

So I would add that to it, but that’s what they care about. They care about results. They care about how much it costs, and they care about whether or not they’re going to enjoy coming to meetings with you.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean that, you know, it, it, there really is something to be said for personal chemistry when it comes to the, the agency client relationship.

And most of the time when I see relationships fail, there’s probably, there’s a problem with the, the personal chemistry of the individuals on both sides of the table. When they thrive, usually there’s a good match. Doesn’t mean that you can’t have success when there is some tension. It doesn’t mean that you can’t fail when everybody’s still happy with each other and kind of seeing things the same way.

Sure. You know, I, particularly in the deciding moments, it really is about that more so than anything else. And if you, I mean, let’s think about it. We don’t wanna work with people that we don’t enjoy being with. Right. It would take you, you have to, none of us do. If you dislike the person that you’re talking with, you have to cross a much larger hurdle in order for yourself to, to say, yes, I’ll, I’ll go ahead and, and I’ll enter into this business arrangement with them.

So, you know, we should give into that, right? Mm-hmm. We, we shouldn’t try to fight that. And if we’ve got, if we don’t have the right fit, move on, go find someone else. But that we’ve now ventured into a whole nother topic that, that perhaps would be worth looking at as well. But it, but it’s a little apart from the vision except to the fact that there are some clients who do wanna, you know, talk with someone who they think is a visionary.

 But the vast majority, vast majority just care about the specifics of what you’re gonna do for them and, and they don’t really care that you can come into a meeting and, you know, sound all highfalutin with your ideas.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I think that, I think the clients respect somebody who can come up with new and interesting ideas that would help build the business and, and move things forward. But exactly to your point. Can they do the work? That’s what they care about. Can, can you actually execute on the work and, and deliver the results that you, you’re saying you can. That’s what they care about.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And those ideas don’t have to be visionary. I mean, frankly, the, the work that I do with SAGA with agency owners.

99.9% of it is not visionary or original or anything like that. But I have ideas based on, you know, the things I’ve experienced, the things that I’ve observed, and so, you know, they’re, they’re relatively simple, but they’re ideas that can help individual owners in the moment with the challenges and opportunities that they have.

That is not being a visionary. That is just sharing the knowledge and expertise and wisdom that you have as someone who has been there, done that. And that’s how we are with our clients as an agency. And so that, that doesn’t require grandiose visions. It only requires that you have insights and that you can listen to what the client is telling you, and that you can feed into that with those ideas that you’ve come up with along the way and the things that you’ve seen work or not work.

Gini Dietrich: And the client may view it as visionary because it’s not something they’ve tried before. Sure. Or they’ve done before. So it’s, yeah. It may not feel that way to you, but to the client is like, Ooh, that’s fantastic. We haven’t even thought about that.

Chip Griffin: Right. And, we see this today with, with a lot of agencies as they’re looking at AI and, and they’re thinking, you know, instead of thinking about how can they use AI to help with their daily blocking and tackling, they’re like, we need to create our own AI models and do all these fancy things.

And, and look, there’s a, there’s a role for agencies that can do that and can do it well. And, and I’m sure there are agencies that will succeed because they build a lot of these things internally to serve their clients’ needs. Sure. But the vast majority of agencies don’t need to do that to be successful.

And so, you know, if you’ve got the, the skillset, if you’ve got the, the bandwidth to work on these things, if, if you’re actually seeing results from it, that’s fine, but don’t feel obligated to come up with some really innovative use of AI for your clients and the, the work that you’re doing.

Focus instead initially on the basics. How can it help me do the, the day-to-day tasks that, that the team and I need to do and we can do them better slash more efficiently and, and put ourselves in a better position to produce results for clients. And if you start thinking about those things that way, instead of thinking, geez, you know, we really have to have that, that huge idea, that big vision, I think most of you will succeed to a greater extent than if you overinvest in trying to find that, that huge game changing idea.

Gini Dietrich: 100%. And if you’re trying, if you’re investing in trying to find that game changing innovative idea, and it, it’s not coming in. It’s not coming in, it’s not coming. You’re not getting any, getting any work done. If instead you focus on what you’re saying, which is using it to make your, make your team more efficient, finding new ways to do things, all of that, you’re getting work done.

You’re getting, you’re having results, you’re making progress versus, and that’s what clients care about versus trying to come up with you know, something 18 or 24 months from now that may or may not be effective.

Chip Griffin: Spot on. Well, I, I think we’ve covered, you know, this topic as well as we can. So my, my vision is for more successful agencies because they’ve listened to us.

Gini Dietrich: That’s right. That’s what I see. I like it. I see that.

Chip Griffin: So on that note, we will draw this episode of the Agency Leadership podcast to a close. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.