Agency of the future: in-office, remote, or hybrid?

Chip Griffin 

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the small agency talk show. I am Chip Griffin, the founder of SAGA Small Agency Growth Alliance. And I am joined today by my fellow rancher in crime. Brad Farris of anchor advisors. Welcome to the show, Brad.

Brad Farris 

Thanks for having me.

Chip Griffin 

It is great to have you here. I you know, we in our pre show conversation is clear that you and I are both fired up today. It’s a summer Friday, but we’ve got energy, and we’re gonna bring it here for the next 30 minutes. So hopefully, folks will enjoy the conversation. I think we have some useful insights to offer, particularly as it comes to what the agency workplace looks like, in the years ahead. Yes. And and some of it may be a little bit contrary to things, frankly, that even I’ve said before, it turns out, I might have been wrong. You’ve changed your mind shift. You know, it’s my prerogative,

Brad Farris 

I allow that I don’t think that thought leaders and experts are allowed to change their minds.

Chip Griffin 

I think it is actually just the opposite. Brad, I really, you have to be willing as a leader to take inputs and allow it to shift your opinion, as you accept that there is more data out there, there are more opinions out there other than your own. And if you if you stubbornly just charge forward with one point of view, you’re not likely to be successful.

Brad Farris 

Well, maybe this would be a useful conversation to like, what is the former point of view that you had? And then what new data came that made you look at it in a different way?

Chip Griffin 

That is essentially a great question, Brad. And I will get into that in just a moment. But first, I first I do want to let you know, if you are watching us live, we would love to take your questions, comments and feedback, we’ll incorporate them here on this episode, if we can. So just comment on whatever platform you’re watching on. If you’re watching this after the fact, leave your comment. And Brad and I will do our best to respond to those comments. But so with that, so my point of view. So when I was looking at the, you know, life in agencies post pandemic, for probably the last year or so I’ve been saying that the future is likely to be a hybrid model. And it’s likely to be, you know, pretty flexible, where there’s, there’s a split between remote work in office and, and it’s really driven by the needs of the individual teams and employees and all that kind of stuff. And the more that I have have studied this and read up on it and just seen what’s happening, I don’t think that that level of flexibility is actually going to fly, I think that agencies are going to have to lean in to one way or the other. Now, it may be that there is some hybrid component to it. But I don’t think it’s that loosey goosey flexible thing that I thought it could be for many months.

Brad Farris 

So before we talk about why you’ve changed that, I just want to emphasize that what I’m seeing among my clients is that most of the owners that I’m working with agree with you that hybrid is the best approach. I see a lot of people saying, you know, I want people in the office three days a week or, you know, Fridays, people can work at home. But I want to have the other days people in the office or some mix of that where people want to have that hybrid approach. And are you seeing similar things among people you’re working with?

Chip Griffin 

Frankly, I’m seeing all over the map. I’ve seen some who were like screw this. We’re never going back to the office. We’re going 100% remote. Yeah, I’ve seen screw this. It’s over. We’re coming back to the office. That’s where we were. And so we’re going to be there. And it’s going to be just like it was in 2019. I see some really kind of figured out as we go. I’ve seen some say, well, maybe I’m more willing to hire remote now, but I’m not really there yet. I mean, it’s it’s really all over the map. I don’t see a lot of consistency in the viewpoints.

Brad Farris 

So we when you had that hybrid approach is sort of your best idea forward. What were you thinking about that made that something that you wanted to that you felt like was the way forward?

Chip Griffin 

So the reason why I saw it is the way forward? And I think we’ve talked about this on a previous discussion, but there are different employees have different needs. Right? There are there are certainly many employees that I would say the majority of employees have come to embrace, maybe not full time remote work, but a lot more remote work than they did before. And I would say that’s probably easily two thirds of the agency workforce is in that bucket. Right, right. But there’s a very strong component that you know, probably at least a fifth that are like no, I want to be in the office. I want the separation between work and home that don’t have the environment. And so so my view and the reason why I came to it was because we’ve got these different conflicting needs. And so therefore in order to accommodate everybody and have all of the talent that we want to have, we’re going to have to have a hybrid model where different people are doing different things. Yeah, the problem is, the more that I’ve looked into this, I think that that ends up creating more problems than it solves, for most agencies. And part of this will depend upon the size too, if you’re, if you’re a three person team, you can probably work these things through a lot easier. But once you start getting up into double digits, and you’ve got groups of people in there working together, and you know, maybe you’ve got your design team is working with your comms team. And you know, what happens when they’re not working the same days, and they need to meet in person. And there’s just a lot of messiness that comes out. And there’s a lot of I think, resentments that will come out amongst the team over the requirements, you know, some of the agency owners I’ve talked to so well, you know, I want to spread it out, you know, so we can have, we can have more social distancing at the office. So, you know, we’ll assign people to come in different days, or let them sign up for different days. The problem is, guess what bread everybody’s Go on, take monday and friday off. They don’t want to be working from home, Monday is a four day weekends. Right? Even if they’re working, they want to work at the beach, or the lake or the mountains or wherever they are. So guess what, that doesn’t work? And that’s, those are the conclusions I’ve come to. I’m curious, what have you seen with your client base? Have you seen any more consistency than I have? Or do your clients have it better together than mine? Do? Apparently,

Brad Farris 

so well? No, here’s the conversations I’m hearing. I want you to come to the office a few days a week. Why? Right? We’ve been working at home for a year and a half. Why magically? Do we want to come to the office? Okay, so that’s, that’s a useful conversation to have, there are some things that are more difficult than the remote environment, maintaining your culture is more difficult. Some training and mentoring is more difficult. And for especially younger team members, there’s a social element to going to the office that gets them out of their house, and they’re kind of frustrated about being in their house. And then for people who have small kids or who have roommates, you know, I just like you said that separation between work, and home is a good thing. So we start having those conversations. But for those people who are really doing well at home, and they’re thriving at home, they know that there are other people who have solved those hard problems. People who have been real companies, since before the pandemic, that are solving the culture problem. They’re solving the training problem and their responses. Why don’t we just work on these things? Like what what is keeping us from solving that problem for ourselves? And so you’re creating tension there in your workforce? Then the second conversation that comes up is, well, what about Marina moved to California? Does she have to come to the office? No, she didn’t have to come to the office. She lives in California. Oh, so if I moved to California, I don’t have to come to the office? How far away? Do I have to move in order not to come to the office? Right. And so you have this very untenable boundary of well, if you live close. Okay, so then are we going to only hire people closely? Are we going to open ourselves to remote employees? Well, if we open ourselves to remote employees, then you have, like, it’s just a crazy boundary that you’re trying to draw that people that live close have to come to the office and other people don’t? I don’t know how you support that from a from an HR perspective, or, or even just from a rational perspective, how you’re explaining it to your team.

Chip Griffin 

But yeah, I mean, you’ve got that. And then on top of that, you had the regulatory and legal challenges of having that distributed workforce for a business that didn’t grow that way initially, right. So there are agencies that started out remote stayed remote. And so, you know, they’ve already had to grapple probably with some of these issues. But even even some of them may be, you know, if you had all your folks were remote, but within a specific specific state, you didn’t have to now you’ve got to start thinking about those issues. And what it means elsewhere, I think, I think part of this brand comes down to, you know, agency owners are sitting there saying, particularly small agency owners, the folks you and I are working with are sitting there saying, you know, I’m paying for this office space. And I think that I think there’s value in getting together. So I still want to have the office space. I just can’t justify having an empty all the time. I can’t, we can’t just be in here one or two days a month for collaboration, and then have it just sitting idle and empty. I think that’s a nonsensical way of looking at it

Brad Farris 

nonsensical,

Chip Griffin 

if the whole thing is you just want to see people there. So you feel like you’re getting your money’s worth out of the rent, you’re not getting your money’s worth out of the rent, and you should get rid of it. But if you’re getting value, even if it’s only one day a week, it may still be or one day, a month even it may still be worth paying that. I mean, guess what, Brad? Already, your office was empty to seventh of the time. You were already paying for dust together two out of every seven days right? And the reality is a lot of those Fridays, it was probably not very many people in the office even pre pandemic. So you were coming up close to half of the time already that your office space was sitting idle. So that’s not how you should look at it, you should look at it in terms of what’s the return on the investment for the time you are spending there. Should you be reconfiguring it? Should you be, you know, adjusting it, but it shouldn’t be about just putting butts in seats so that you feel good about that rent check.

Brad Farris 

So So here’s how I respond to people with that. Because you’re right, a ton of people are like, well, I’m paying all this rent. Yeah. Okay. So you want to feel good about paying rent. So you make your employees feel bad about coming to work? Is that is that the trade off? You want to make? Like, seriously, that’s how you want to handle that? No, you don’t want to handle that like that. And this is where I particularly

Chip Griffin 

since our teams are what make us different? Or why clients hire us. gragg team is so different.

Brad Farris 

Yes, exactly. Which is why I agree with you that hybrid is untenable, because being remote adds particular costs, right? There’s technology costs, like you said, there’s HR costs of having employees in different jurisdictions. So being remote adds certain costs. And as soon as you have one person remote, you pretty much have all those costs. Right? Right. Being in the office has different costs, it has cost of rent and those kind of things. If you’re hybrid, you’re incurring both sets of costs, you still have to maintain a remote culture, you still have to figure out how to train people and hire people and onboard people remotely. And you have to pay rent, and you have to, you know, force people to commute, which they don’t want to do. And so hybrid to me feels like the worst. I would much rather people say no, we’re gonna go back to the office, you’re gonna be here five days a week, then try to manage some kind of hybrid thing.

Chip Griffin 

Right. And I think there is space for the agency that wants to be in the for sure is a week, I think that that that model is not dead, because there are employees want to be there. Now what it does do is it creates, you know, a real bifurcation in the workforce. And you’ve got people who are willing to work for in office agencies and people who were willing to work for remote agencies. And so it is going to create some sort of a talent divide. It’s unclear to me exactly what that talent divide ends up doing. Right? You know, are there enough commonalities amongst the people who are opting for one or the other, that you then end up with, you know, different specializations for the agencies that are in office versus remote, I suspect that there are going to be enough commonalities that there will be a market difference between the in office and remote agency, but I can’t tell you exactly what it’s going to be at.

Brad Farris 

About 20% of our work is in recruiting when when we help people to grow their agency, we also help them to hire. And I will tell you, the first question that a job seeker asked is, is this an in office role or remote role? And if it’s in office, their salary expectations are about 15%, higher? Yep, they want to get paid for that commuting time. And so in addition to the rent, you’re gonna pay more for people that are going to come to your office, and you’ve shrunk your talent pool. And so I do think that in office is viable, but I think it’s gonna be a challenge to figure out what is the marketplace that supports that in office agency,

Chip Griffin 

right. But it does still exist, because there are those employees who want that they’re on. And so if you’ve got the, you know, a workforce that is ready, willing and able, and anybody excited to be in the office, it allows that model to continue to exist. But I do think I’ve really come to that conclusion that the agencies need to lean very heavily in one direction or the other doesn’t mean that, just as we did pre pandemic, we can’t have certain exceptions to things right. There were remote agencies that paid for we workspace for employees, we needed to get out of the house. There were in office agencies that had the occasional remote employee, for whatever reason, in fact, in my past lives, I was one of those people from time to time where I, you know, I worked 500 miles away from the main office. And you know, it worked out it created issues. It absolutely did, because even though there were one or two of us who did it, there were a lot of other folks were like, why can’t I do that, too. And that’s going to be magnified today versus what it was 10 or 15 years ago,

Brad Farris 

I worked in an office 1000 miles from where I lived. And the thing that was interesting to me was that there were certain conversations that people would only have face to face. And so when I would come in, there would be this line, I’d have to block the whole day because there’ll be a line outside my door of people that wanted to have the face conversations, and I need, I need to do that. That’s why I’m here. Right? But it really created a very odd dynamic.

Chip Griffin 

Yeah, and I mean, look, it’s it is something that we’re going to have to adjust to anyway, right? Because, you know, everything in business is becoming, you know, more global, more disaggregated and so Even if even if we’re working for 100%, in office business, we’re doing a lot of work with clients, partners, vendors, different time zones, different geographies, different cultures. And if we’re doing that we need to learn how to adapt to a lot of these different things anyway. But I think strategically each agency is going to need to, to figure out, you know, what, what their point of view is, you know, I think we’ve talked previously about the importance of agencies having a point of view on a lot of different things, yes, they need to have a point of view on how they work, and the kind of work that to do and where they do it. And that’s, that’s going to have to be a part of the definition of each individual agency, and it is absolutely going to change who they get as, as employees, who they get as clients what kind of work they get. And you’ve got to be, you know, willing to make those changes as you go forward and not sort of stubbornly hold on to the past.

Brad Farris 

And if you’re, if you’re trying to go back to a less flexible work space, you need to have a very cohesive story about why you’re making that choice, and you need to sell it to your team, because they’re not, I think that most of the leaders felt like the pandemic changes were temporary. And most of the employees don’t think it’s temporary. So I think that’s part of the, you know, the the people being at odds here is that the the employees are like, this is working, why should I change? And the and the, and the owners are saying, No, come on back. Like, we never intended to be a fully remote culture. So we’re coming back. But you need a reason. Like, why

Chip Griffin 

what what is going to be different when you move? Right. And there’s been talk about the the great resignation, where, you know, depending upon the survey, you read, it’s anywhere between 70 and 95% of employees are considering leaving their jobs. And, and then I saw it, you know, HR publication that I read this week, that that apparently, if you talk to managers, you know, less than 20% think that’s real. Yeah. So you’ve got this massive disconnect between what the workforce is apparently thinking and what managers believe they’re thinking. There’s always been that to some degree, right? I mean, I don’t think there’s any business that I’ve ever been involved with where you had some degree of a disconnect between management and align workers. But I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything quite that

Brad Farris 

important. It’s huge. It is. And I do think, I mean, I’m on a couple of message boards, where I see both owners and employees. And the employees are pretty resentful about this idea of coming back to work. And I think many of them are going to look for a remote job that becomes available.

Chip Griffin 

Yeah, but I mean, at the same time, I think there are those who would be upset if they didn’t go back. Great. So you know, so so I think you have to, as an agency owner, you’re going to have to put a stake in the ground and say, This is what we’re doing. You have to understand that wherever that stake lands, they’re going to be people who land on one side or the other, there’s going to lose employees over you’re gonna lose current employees, and you’re going to lose prospective hires, because of that decision. And that’s okay. Yeah, it’s okay. Not every employee is a good fit for you, just like not every client is a good fit, you have to be willing to, to embrace your point of view on things and how you’re going to do it, and accept the change that comes along with it and the consequences that come along with it.

Brad Farris 

So there are some things that are more difficult in this remote environment. And I wonder if we could take a couple minutes and look for some examples of people who have done this well, like, maintaining culture, I think is one thing that is difficult in a remote environment. And particularly, you know, I have clients who said, you know, there are people that I’ve hired during the pandemic, I’ve never met them. You know, that’s a weird feeling to have employees that you’ve never met. How are people doing that kind of onboarding and culture maintenance in a remote environment?

Chip Griffin 

Well, I mean, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there. I think that’s the most difficult thing with remote. But the onboarding in particular, you know, because I think a whole lot of what a new employee in the past and most organizations has, has developed about the business has come from that in person interaction, because typically, when you’re onboarding employees, it’s not just the process, you can replicate the process remotely, you can do you know, the paperwork, and the basic training and, and the meet the team type stuff. But what you don’t get is you don’t get that, you know, we take the new employee out to lunch, we take the new employee out to happy hour, you know, we sort of we really get to know the person as a person. And I’ll be honest with you, Brad, I think this is an area that nobody’s really quite got it right yet because that that personal part of the culture, so not the business part, not the processes part, but that that human interaction part has been very difficult to do remotely. And I think even firms that have been remote for a long time will tell you that that is challenging. That’s why a lot of them get together in person at least a couple of times a year. But by the way, That cost money. So you got to add that in there. That’s why it’s why getting rid of your office is not a cost savings, right? That’s right, you’re gonna spend that same money, right? You’re gonna, you got to spend it somewhere. And it’s just you’re probably going to spend it on, you know, hotels and meeting rooms and restaurants when you get together for for Team retreats and team meetings instead of on, you know, the ongoing cost of rent. But I mean, have you seen anybody who’s gotten that that culture piece, right? Because that’s just, it’s so difficult, I think to get that done well, and the stuff people have tried the virtual happy hours. Yeah. Virtual game night.

Brad Farris 

Yeah.

What Come on,

Brad Farris 

I would say I have one client who was remote before the pandemic. And her process when she hires someone new is that she flies them to wherever her manager lives. And they rent a conference room in a hotel, and they work together there for a week. And a week is a short period of time, but it’s at least some time where we’re next to each other, and we’re overhearing things, and we’re getting chances to ask questions. And, you know, if someone’s flying in, you’re gonna have some meals with them, you’re gonna, you’re gonna do breakfast a couple times, or dinner a couple times. And if there’s other people that are in that locale, they can all you know, hop into those meals and meet each other. So that that’s one process that I think was working well, I have another client that’s really good at just welcoming the new person, and they just do it in slack. But they kind of start an Ask me anything kind of thing where they say, you know, Chip lives in New Hampshire, he’s a, he’s an umpire, lifelong baseball fan, you know, whatever the it’s mostly personal stuff that they’re putting in there. So that people then start engaging with them on that personal level, and not about business stuff. And the challenge for that is for the new person, they might not be comfortable sharing a whole bunch of light.

Chip Griffin 

When and I think people are getting even less comfortable with sharing on the personal side. And I mean, you know, because it has become much more of a minefield for everyone. Yes. And so it is, it is a challenging place to go. But but but I that somehow that personal connection has to be made, because that’s where the culture comes from, the culture doesn’t come from what’s in the employee handbook, know, or, you know, what’s on the Asana checklist, or something like that, it comes from the personal interactions of the team members. So I love the one that brings people in, you know, to, you know, the manager employee together for a week. Yeah, I do think, I mean, a week is actually a fair amount of time, as long as they’ve got their calendars, you know, cleared enough that it’s not, you know, they’re just watching each other on the phone, or on zoom or someone else, because I’ve seen that, and if that doesn’t work, but, but I’ve done enough work over the last 20 years, where we’ve had, you know, multiple offices or things like that, and we would always bring, you know, hires who had to work either remotely or worked with smaller team units and needed to interact with referee always had them spend a week early on, you know, usually in their first month, you know, with the mothership, or with the regional office or whatever. So they had that opportunity to build those relationships I but that’s actually that’s doing in person Yes, to do it, it’s not. So I think, to me, the gist of this is that it’s very difficult to do it purely remotely, I would agree, you have to have some, you know, in person, not with a camera, not with a keyboard interaction.

Brad Farris 

I have, I have another client who he rents a big house up in Michigan in in for a month, and invites people to come with their families and just work together in the house. Not everybody comes at the same time people come in different times. But it just gives people a chance to overlap and have that non professional interaction with each other. Another another a client of mine that was remote before the pandemic, they do a really good job doing assessments. So twice a year, they do a pretty extensive assessment of from their employees where they ask them particular questions. And these are not like multiple choice. These are like essay questions where they’re getting real answers back. And they they concatenate them and do some sentiment analysis on them and kind of look for themes. And the management team really, that’s an important piece of input to them as they’re making their decisions because they’re they want to make sure they’re listening and hearing what’s going on. Because that’s the other thing you missed by not being able to wander around in the office.

Chip Griffin 

Right well and that’s why it’s it’s so critically important that managers are having their regular one on ones with all of their direct reports. You know, it’s something that that I rant and rave about constantly and and i and i know some of my clients are tired of my broken record on that because you know, I will often sign every coaching call. So how are those one on ones going Because I mean, I, I honestly think that there’s, there are a few things that make a bigger difference in the performance of an agency or really any business than weekly one on ones that don’t get missed between every manager and every employee. It does so much as far as making sure that everybody’s on the same page, you’re picking up on those little things. And, and those you can do remotely, yep, they’re never as good as doing it over a cup of coffee at the you know, because when when I’m in person, I always like to do them, like if the coffee shop or something like that, where you, you take it out of the office environment a little bit, and, you know, you’re

Brad Farris 

neutral territory,

Chip Griffin 

or neutral territory, you know, because it’s, it is that opportunity, but those are things you can at least do remotely to, you know, to continue to foster the relationship between your opportunities to get together in person by their to me, there’s just no replacement for still having those at least occasional opportunities to get together in person, whether that’s, you know, once a year, once a quarter or something like that.

Brad Farris 

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I think that more often than once a year, I think it’s got to be to two to four times a year that you’re getting the team together, sometimes just the team sometimes including, you know, family members, so that you can get to know each other.

Chip Griffin 

Yeah, I mean, honestly, that comes down a lot to how far spread your team is. Right? Because, you know, the farther spread out it is, the more costly it is, for certain those kinds of things. You know, I, I was involved with an international business before I became a coach. And that was very challenging, right? Yeah, we never brought the whole team together was 100 person company not gonna do that. But you know, even amongst the leadership team, it was hard to bring everybody together all that often, because the costs were just astronomical for doing so. And we could have rented an office tower probably for we spent on travel.

Brad Farris 

So if I’ve got an office, and I wasn’t remote before the pandemic, how do I think through which of these directions I’m going in? And what are some steps that I want to take if I’m going one direction or the other?

Chip Griffin 

So I mean, you kind of talk to your team. Yeah. Right. I mean, yeah, so So hopefully, you’ve been doing those one on ones. But you know, hopefully, you’re, you’re also you’re doing other things that are, you know, whether it’s, I mean, I’m intrigued by this idea of having your employees write essays for feedback, I, I’m skeptical, to be honest, that that’s something that you could do at scale. But I mean, if you can get your employees to do that, I mean, obviously, that’s great. But whatever method you use, to get feedback, and, and I really hope over the last 18 months, you’ve been doing a lot to stay in touch with your team and, and really, you know, sort of feel their pulse. But if, regardless, now, you really have to dig into that. And you have to understand where are they coming from and figure out, you know, sort of it’s the the individual blocking and tackling, which individuals are you likely to lose, if you lean into the in office, which ones you likely to lose if you lean into remote, because I guarantee you that if you’ve got a team of more than about five people, you’ve got different points of view on this. And you’re going to have to figure that out. And then you have to make a decision based on your style, your approach, what you’re hearing from your team, the vision that you have for the business, put all those things into the washing machine, spin it around a little bit and figure out what that that approach is. But I think if you if you go with the sort of, we’re going to kind of we’re going to sort it out as we go, we’re going to let everybody kind of do their thing, you’re going to end up with a mess on your you’re gonna end on your hands, you can’t do the flexible hybrid thing, you’ve got to do the, you know, we’re leaning into it, and we’re taking a real solid point of view on it.

Brad Farris 

And one word about that office, your office is a sunk cost, you can’t get that rent back, you’re probably not going to be able to sublease it the furniture is what it is, it is not a factor in this decision that whether you go to the office or you don’t go the office, that cost is the same. So you just have to live with it. And hopefully you’re not on a 10 year lease. That’s a bigger problem. We should have talked about that before you signed it, but it just is what it is. And so that can’t be a factor that you’re

Chip Griffin 

putting into this. Right. It’s something you sort out after you’ve made your decision. Yeah. Because it’s and honestly, it’s it’s the same about the team. I mean, you know, I wouldn’t make this decision around one team member, right? I mean, you may have a rock star on your team or somebody who thinks a rockstar. And if you say, Well, look, they really want to be in the office. And it’s the only way we’re going to keep them. For God’s sakes, don’t make it off of one team member, you’re operating a business. And don’t make it just off of your own perspective, right. I mean, you know, you shouldn’t eat, your business should be a reflection of what you are and what you want to achieve. But at the same time, if you’ve built something that’s already successful, you got to you got to try to factor in all these other things. And you’re probably going to have to make some sacrifices along the way, or come up with an approach so that you can do different from your team. It’s It’s not my preferred approach my preferred approaches for Europe, the ownership to do the same thing. But there are plenty of agencies who have been successful, where the owner does sort of their own thing. You just got to figure out how to fill in the gaps around that if you’re going to take that approach.

Brad Farris 

I would say most of my clients went into the office, even when there was no one there. If that’s the way you want to use your office, you could have the world’s biggest office, play all the music, you want to play whatever.

Chip Griffin 

Right? Now, I think that the bigger challenge is if you tell your team to be in the office, and you’re not, that’s not good, right? That’s, that is the tougher one to sell. Yeah. But you know, if you, you know, if you are going to end up with a scenario where you’ve got, you know, you are in the office, and so and some people are in the office, you’ve got to, you’ve got to really address the problems that come along with that, because, you know, I think there’s a lot of good thinking and research that seems to suggest that, that that can lead to a lack of diversity amongst teams, and particularly, you know, if it favors the folks who come into the office, who may not be demographically the same as the cheap, the people who choose not to come in the office, so you got to it’s one of the reasons why I really don’t like this The flexible hybrid approach. I think you really need to just put that stake in the ground, pick something and run with it. let the chips fall where they may.

Brad Farris 

I think you’re 100% right. I thought we were gonna disagree more chip. sorted. I

Chip Griffin 

was I’m a little disappointed, Brad. But you know, it is what it is. I think we got a lot off of our chests. And I’m happy to end on you telling me that I’m right. So you’re right ship. Wow, that’s just just that made my week. Brad. I’m Have a great weekend. I’m very happy to go into the weekend. With that. Brad, if someone wants to know more about you and anchor advisors, where can they go?

Brad Farris 

anchor advisors comm is the best place to see us.

Chip Griffin 

Excellent. And if you’d like to learn more about SAGA, you can go to small agency growth.com. Of course, if you’d like to see a replay of this or any other episode, you can go to small agency.tv. And finally, we have an all new revamped SAGA community brings all of the different resource library webinar replays, discussion forums, all that kind of stuff, puts it all into one place at the SAGA community.com it is free to join and I would love to see you all

Brad Farris 

there. It’s super fancy. I’m very impressed. You know, it’s

Chip Griffin 

I was, I was pleasantly surprised. I’ve been spending the last seven or eight months trying to rebuild things. And I was doing it all from scratch and bringing together different technology tools. And then about a month ago, I came across something called mighty networks, which mighty networks. It’s a great platform. It brings everything together. It feels very Facebook like Yeah, but it’s not Facebook. Yeah. So it’s it’s a community that we can grow together. And so I’m really looking forward to that. And I’ve been pleased with the participation in the first 10 days or so. So yeah, hopefully you will will take a moment and go to the SAGA community.com and join. And with that we will draw this episode of the small agency talk show to a close hopefully we’ve offered you some useful insights and maybe some entertainment as you head into the weekend. I know I’m looking forward to a couple of days off here and at least as much as I ever take days off. It’s a summer weekend, so maybe maybe I’ll kick back for a few hours. So on that note, thank you Brad. Thank you for watching and we will see you next week.