Who put that team in charge?

Who put them in charge?

Many agencies seem to revolve around one particular team.

Which team differs by agency, but the way it manifests itself is fairly consistent:

• The agency’s ways of working feel like they’re designed to make things easier for that team (even if it actually makes life harder for everyone else)
• The agency’s performance reporting disproportionately uses their metrics (and, in many cases, the agency literally uses this team’s dashboard)
• This team’s weekly or monthly meetings set the schedule for most meetings in the agency
• This team seems to chase everyone else for things
• If you collected the agency’s social media posts, you’d find that the majority are about this one team.

Last week I spoke to two of the owners of a brilliant creative agency who, when we started to talk about the agency’s processes, said “the client services team runs the show.”

When I’m told this, my question is always the same: “what was the original founder’s role?”

…and in this case, sure enough, the founder was an account manager.

Why this happens

This emphasis on one team doesn’t usually happen intentionally. It typically goes something like this:

1. The agency is founded by someone with a background in [dominant team]
2. The founder wins more work than they can manage themselves, so they hire. It’s still early for the agency, so the people it can afford to hire are pretty junior and the founder trains them to do things the way they do things (sometimes they even document it)
3. The founder wins so much work that they need to keep hiring and, when they get to somewhere around 5-8 people, they need to hire someone to help them manage everyone’s workload. They delegate some things (usually keeping too much themselves) and the agency’s processes begin to get more formalised around a founder and a group of “helpers”
4. As the agency keeps winning work, those “helpers” become the most experienced and established members of the team, training the next recruits and showing them “how we do things around here” (whether or not those processes are documented)
5. Eventually, the agency decides to expand into other services (which it might have already started to do). The new blood brought in to expand the service lines might be more experienced - they may even have grown teams before - but they find themselves needing to slot their new services into the agency’s established processes. They get a slot in the already-scheduled meetings to add their points to the usual agenda. They get some bandwidth from the current client services team, marketing team and sales team.

This can happen over years, months, or weeks, depending on how quickly the agency grows.

When is this a problem?

If the agency wants to remain a specialist, with an operational structure designed to support one specific expertise, this usually isn’t a problem, as long as the agency owners are happy that the other teams are playing supporting roles.

Branded3, for example, was (for the most part) a specialist SEO agency, structured to deliver effective, profitable SEO work.

So when we eventually decided to try and grow our PPC revenues in the mid 2010s we found it difficult. We hired experienced people from (then-)$42bn turnover Dentsu and told them to do things the way we did, like demanding they generate their own leads through blogging and public speaking, even though that was clearly not a strength (and not for a lack of effort on their part). Management bandwidth was wasted discussing how well the paid media team was integrating, instead of adapting our existing processes to accommodate it. Resentment grew when the paid media team was seen to “not follow the rules”, even though their mandate was growth, not compliance.

A dominant team can be a problem when:

• You want to expand into more services
• You want to sell more of your current services to each client
• Your department heads each have targets (and they’re equally ambitious)
• Your dominant service is not one that’s likely to grow (e.g. the market for it is saturated; it’s particularly commoditised; or it’s likely to be disrupted by AI, offshoring or something else)

What should you do?

1. Ask your team (maybe start by asking yourself): “which team runs the show at this agency?” You can do this yourself (in which case I’d recommend asking just a few of the bigger personalities, from various departments, in an informal setting); managers can ask the question in their next one to ones; or you can bring in a third party to help
2. Document the agency’s delivery process (although which team members show up in the sales and marketing processes can also be an indicator): who owns each step and whose benefit is it for? Who is signing the work off?
3. Look at the dashboard or management information you typically would to make sure that things are going in the right direction: are any of those KPIs team specific? Which teams feed information into this report?
4. Look at your senior management team: which team does each person come from?

Finally, ask yourself: do I care? Is this holding us back? Or is this making us a better specialist/more client centric/more efficient?