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Being a transparent agency leader

In this episode, Marcel Petitpas of Parakeeto and Ken Jacobs of Jacobs Consulting & Executive Coaching join Chip Griffin of SAGA to talk about how agency leaders can adopt a transparent approach with their team.

The panel discusses the importance of sharing information, including financial data, with the full team to get the best results. At the same time, they stress the importance of education and context to help employees better understand the information that they are receiving.

Listen in as they share some of their personal experiences to help you learn what works and decide how you can put transparency to work for your own agency.

Resources

Key takeaways

  • Marcel Petitpas: “Most people would like to be more transparent, but often have fears, insecurities, or just operational gaps that are getting in their way of being able to do that.”
  • Ken Jacobs: “There is evidence that companies and leaders who are more transparent, there’s real results there. Better stock price if you’re on the market. Better profitability, better loyalty, better psychological safety among your troops.”
  • Chip Griffin: “If you don’t come into owning an agency with business knowledge, you need to find a way to acquire it.”
  • Marcel Petitpas: “Most agencies are suffering from indigestion, not starvation. They just happen to feel the same, especially on the P&L.”
  • Ken Jacobs: “Fear is not a good business strategy, so we’ve got to get over it.”
  • Chip Griffin: “A lot of owners will say to me, I wish my team would think more like an owner. Why would they? They’re not.”

Related

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 Small Agency Talk Show. I’m your host, Chip Griffin, the founder of SAGA, the Small Agency Growth Alliance, and I am delighted to have with me today two regular panelists who are going to bring a really good conversation to the table because we already started talking about it in the Green room and hopefully we’ll remember a couple of the good points now that we’re live and on the air for everybody else, but Marcel Petipas and Ken Jacobs. Welcome to the show guys.

Ken Jacobs: Thank you.

Marcel Petitpas: Thanks for having us, Chip.

Ken Jacobs: Nice to be back.

Chip Griffin: Before I introduce the, the topic at hand, why don’t you each just give a very brief overview of yourselves and let folks know where they can find you.

So, Marcel, take it away.

Marcel Petitpas: Sure. Uh, I’m Marcel Petitpas, CEO at Parakeeto, we’re a firm that helps digital and creative agencies measure and improve their performance and install the systems that are required for things like tracking time, managing projects, and ultimately getting good insights out of the data that’s created by those systems.

Chip Griffin: Excellent. And Ken.

Ken Jacobs: I am Ken Jacobs. Jacobs Consulting and Executive Coaching. I help agencies, primarily agencies, primarily pr grow business, managed business for profit, improve client service, enhanced team performance leadership communications. We do that through consulting and training and more and more and more.

I work with the CEOs, presidents, owners, heads of those agencies to become more inspired, inspiring, and effective leaders. And we do that through one-on-one leadership coaching.

Chip Griffin: Excellent. Well, you both bring a, a wealth of knowledge and expertise to the table here and some experience working with agencies that I think will be interesting for our listeners.

And so what I, what we started talking about in the green room and what I think would be interesting to explore here is sort of the, the intersection between the two specialties that you bring to the table. So numbers and profitability, leadership and management. And so let’s start with thinking about as a, as an owner, how do we communicate effectively with our teams about numbers and profitability?

In other words, how transparent should we be? How should we be sharing this information? Ken?

Ken Jacobs: Well, I, I would lean into transparency. I would, uh, they’re already, they already know one another’s salary, so it’s Right. No shock there. You may not wanna share yours as the agency owner, but there is evidence that companies and leaders who are transparent or more transparent, there’s real results there.

Better stock price if you’re on the market. Better profitability, better loyalty, better psychological safety among your troops. So I would say lean into transparency so long as you’re providing context. And I’ll send it over to Marcel to, I know he is got a point of view about that.

Marcel Petitpas: Yeah. I mean, and I’m, I’m largely in line, uh, with Ken’s point of view.

We, we run an extremely transparent company ourselves. We encourage our clients to do that as well. In my experience, the things that are, are often getting in a client’s way, however of doing that, is that they don’t even really have the numbers themselves. And so, They, there’s, there’s things they want to be transparent about, but they’re not even measuring them properly.

They don’t fully understand those things. And often the owner, um, you know, rightfully so, has some insecurity about opening up a conversation about a concept that they don’t fully understand themselves. And I think there is a point in time, there’s a certain amount of, um, you know, Understanding that needs to be built so that that conversation can be opened, uh, in a productive way.

And then there are going to be questions and challenges and digging into the details from the team that can often help solidify and harden those ideas and build that understanding. So I think for a lot of owners, there’s this question of, you know, how do I get to a place where I have the numbers and the confidence in those numbers to even start bringing that to the team.

Because I would say that most people would like to be more transparent, but often have fears, uh, insecurities or just operational gaps that are getting in their way of being able to do that.

Ken Jacobs: You know, and it just, building on that, you know, I always say fear is not a good business strategy, so we’ve gotta get over it.

I’m a little shocked at what you said that there are, you know, agency owners who really don’t get the numbers yet, but, but at the same time, you know, I, when I speak to agency owners, why did you find the, found the agency? Well, I love PR and I’m good at client service and, well, none of that matters. If you are gonna be a successful agency owner, you’ve gotta be a successful business person, an entrepreneur, a small business person.

Uh, otherwise you’re just not going to succeed. And so if you’ve opened your firm without those skills and that understanding and that mindset, the small business owner mindset, you, you, you gotta get it, you’ve gotta get it right because you, you will not be, and it is not enough to be good in PR or content or digital or marketing or any of those things.

It is about running a business.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, and I think I, I think there are a couple of good points in here that I’d, I’d like to highlight. And you know, the fact is most agency owners didn’t get into the game because they wanted to run a business. Most agency owners are accidental owners in some way, shape or form.

Maybe they started out as a freelancer because they were between jobs and it mushroomed into something and, oh, look, I’ve got a business now. Maybe I should do something with it. And, and so that’s a very common story, and if you don’t come into it with the business knowledge, you need to find a way to acquire it.

And some people have worked in mid-size or larger agencies where there may be a finance team or others who can share this information, but a lot don’t come from that world. Maybe they came from in-house, maybe they were a journalist. And so all of those things mean that they, they need to learn on the job, and you can’t communicate these things effectively to your team if you don’t understand them yourselves.

Marcel Petitpas: Related to that, you know, one of the things that we deal with a lot at Parakeeto is, uh, coming in behind bad management of these conversations. And so this is counterproductive to the conversation that we’re having a little bit. But I’ve seen the effects of people trying to start, you know, putting metrics and numbers in front of their team and doing so without understanding those things.

Exposing, you know, some metrics, but not the other ones that should be exposed at the same time to counterbalance. And then I come in and I end up, you know, talking to them about utilization, for example, and all of a sudden capacity is is all convoluted because where they’re trying to strip out holidays and non-billable time, the definition of a billable hour has been extended to include things that are clearly not billable.

The effectiveness of utilization in order to answer the questions is designed to answer has completely gone out the window. And you see the same thing with things like gross margin. And so I’ve seen the effects of not really being thoughtful. And not really having a solid understanding when exposing these metrics to the team and then letting the process of, you know, because there is this natural process where the team’s gonna dig in, they’re gonna ask questions, they’re going to wrestle with the incentive structure that those metrics start to introduce to them and the feedback loop that it creates for their performance.

And not understanding the, the boundaries that should be in place around what can be adapted in a metric and what can’t. Um, because of the effects, of course, the changing the definition of metric has on, on the feedback that it’s providing. So a perfect example of this head agency owner that. , it was like, I don’t know why we’re not profitable.

Our, our utilization is like 85%. And then I came to find out that they did a four day work week. And so I was like, well, your utilization’s not 85%. It’s that number minus one day a week multiplied by the 20 people on your team. But because you, you know, change the definition of utilization because your team felt like it was an unfair reflection of, you know, that they took vacation time, paid time off, because the definition of capacity within that number changed.

Now you actually don’t have visibility into the fact that utilization is your biggest challenge as an agency or that you know, you, you need to charge more to compensate for your, you know, progressively low utilization because you’re offering this four day work week. So this was a perfect example of somebody that couldn’t see the problem in the numbers, even though they were tracking the right number because they were tracking it in the wrong way.

Ken Jacobs: But they knew, but they knew something was wrong. Right? Because they hired you at least. So, I mean, that, that’s the key. If, if you are not conversant and knowledgeable and comfortable in all this, and I think, I think we’ve gotta be comfortable with numbers. They’re just numbers, right? But you’ve to, to again be a successful agency owner, be a successful business person, you, you either have to bring it or you’ve gotta hire someone and be open to it. And look, I always say when we, we, you know, we have a fiscal best practices engagement and I always say, you know, here’s where the agency is stacking now versus standard, you know, physical best practices.

Here’s what you’d have to do to get there. It’s your choice to implement and here’s, here’s how we can get there. But it’s up to you. It’s up to you, but it’s gotta start with that knowledge. And like, can you imagine someone running an integrated, you know, launching an integrated communications agency, not really knowing much about PR or not really knowing much about advertising or content or, I mean, it’s insane.

And yet, and yet from what you’re saying, and in my experience, they’re, they’re doing it as well. And what are, what a lost op, you know, it’s not an easy game, right? It’s not an easy career. That our clients and prospects have been, you know, drawn to, or that call to them, or they’ve chosen or it’s chosen them, it’s not easy.

Why not get some help. And, and why not make some money?

Chip Griffin: Yeah. Making money’s a, a good thing. And, and if you’re not, then why are you taking on all the risk and stress of running a business. But, you know, I think we’re, we’ve all agreed that we are in favor of transparency.

We’re all agreed the owner needs to understand the, the numbers and that there’s a lot of complexity in the data, um, in, and, and so, you know, grasping that first before you can share with your team is important. But, but now let’s, let’s assume that we’ve gotten that far. Ken, how do we share this information with our team without it coming across as just a data dump?

Right? Yeah. That just, that confuses them. How do we, particularly if we’re an agency that, that historically has not been transparent with its team. How do you, how do you begin transparency in an effective way?

Ken Jacobs: So a couple of thoughts come to mind. You know, it’s never too early to start. It’s never too early to get better.

So you don’t look back at, well, here’s where we’ve messed up and have, like, what do we want this to look like in the future? So part of that is that mindset. Number two is to acknowledge that for every employee, it’s what’s in it for me. And there’s nothing wrong with that. And so I think the key is, is first of all, not to think here’s what the agency leadership wants to share, but start with what do my, what do I want my employees to, to understand, retain, and maybe even repeat to themselves and one another.

So it’s keeping it fairly simple, right? And understanding all those things. And then putting into context, helping them understand that when an agency is profitability, That could mean better benefits. That could mean greater investment in technology and other things, you know, so they’ve gotta understand that for example, when it’s a tightly run ship, not overly tight, but well managed ship, that there are benefits to everyone in this room. Start. Don’t start with the features. Start with the benefits, right? Here’s what you. if, if we can get to this agency standard of, of profitability. And I, and I think too many agency owners think, oh, I wish they acted as if they owned the firm, but they don’t.

Right? You do. Right. You are gonna reap most of the money. So, so let’s get out of that mindset and instead work with them to really understand what this means and the benefits to everyone if we can improve profitability. Even a little bit at first. Even a little bit.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. That, that, that’s always one of my pet peeves, by the way.

Because a lot of owners will say to me, I, I wish they would think more like an owner. Why would they? They’re not.

Ken Jacobs: Did you give them some stock? Okay. Right.

Chip Griffin: I mean, I don’t think, you know, I, I mean it’s just, it’s, it’s incredibly unlikely that someone is going to behave like something they are not, and to expect that is kind of silly.

But, but Marcel, so you know the clients that you work with, what are you seeing in, in regards to transparency? Are they share after they’ve worked with you for a while? Have they started to share more with their teams? And, and if so, what have you observed from that process?

Marcel Petitpas: Yeah, it’s, it’s a central part of our thesis and we call this the, the Agency Profitability Flywheel, and there’s four parts to it.

The first part is a data feedback loop, so it’s about documenting your assumptions, which as you know, the most basic of all, all things a lot of agencies are not doing a very good job of, which is, when we sold this project, what were the expectations? What did we sell it for? How much time did we expect that to take?

Are those assumptions structured in a way that makes sense? That maps to how we think about resource planning, that maps to how we think about our departments and so on, so we can project those out into the future. And then are we measuring what actually happened so that when we sit down to have a conversation with our team, everyone’s sitting on the same side of the table agreeing on what happened?

Because when we don’t do this, what ends up happening in retrospectives, in my experience is so much of the time is wasted on people arguing about what they believe happened during the project because there’s no data to look at. And so that conversation is not very productive and often can cause challenges.

Whereas if we can all just objectively say, okay, here’s the data we thought it was gonna take this much time, it took twice as much time. Why is that? Then as a team, you can start to create buy-in and you know, it’s funny, people want their team to think like owners, but they give them no ownership and they give them, you know, no opportunity to create buy-in.

So in this process, as an owner, if you can just sit down and say, here are the facts. We spent twice as much time as we expected to on this website. What’s the challenge? Then the team can come to you and say, well, you know, we, this, this thing was not asked in the discovery process and ended up causing an issue.

There is a lot of friction in the process where we hand it off from design to development and, you know, we, we should work on that. And when they come up with these ideas and they come up with these insights, they’re much more likely to have ownership over those things to actually follow through. And once you build that understanding, eventually as an owner, you can remove yourself from that conversation.

Because what you’ve done is organically taught your team how to sit down, look at that information, interpret it, and then have an intelligent conversation around it. And that is the flywheel that essentially can bake, you know, efficiency and balancing of the incentives into the business in a very organic way.

But it takes a lot of deliberate effort at first, and it takes a lot of facilitation of those conversations until the team starts to understand how to facilitate that conversation themselves.

Chip Griffin: Well, I, I think it’s really important that you’ve talked about how you can empower your team to be part of the solution as you’re sharing more information and, and they, you wanna help your team understand how little decisions that they make along the way can have a big impact at the end of the day.

So, for example, one of the examples I usually share with folks is, let’s say that you’ve, you know, you’ve, you’ve budgeted 10 hours a month from a certain employee working on a particular client project. And, let’s say each week they say, well, you know, I, I, I just spent an extra 30 minutes writing the press release or perfecting the web design because it just, I, I could make it just that much better.

It was only 30 minutes. Well at the end of the month, you’ve now spent two additional hours, which again, in, in absolute terms doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s a 20% cost increase that you’ve now brought to the project. And so if you’re able to share this information, you’re able to give them context so that they understand how those little decisions can have an impact and more so, how you can help them if they’re not spending that time, because now that’s now 30 minutes, so they can’t spend on another project that you had budgeted them for. And so that’s why we have people feeling like they’re burned out because we’re making poor decisions on how we’re allocating our time.

Ken Jacobs: And I, I think so much of it goes back to the original core budget to the client. You know, I know a lot of unfortunate, uh, agencies where they base it on previous similar budgets, but not what we really spent to execute those similar projects. Yes. You know, if, if every year you budget a hundred and you cost 120, you gotta start budgeting 120.

Like you gotta face it. That’s number one. Number two, especially with new clients, especially with new clients, if you think it’s gonna take, let’s say, a hundred grand in fees, seriously, budget, like 20% above it, the client doesn’t know. because you don’t know what kind of client they’re gonna be. You don’t know how much handholding, you don’t know how much following you’re gonna need to do follow up to get stuff done.

You don’t know how, how necessarily, how much reporting they need. It’s, it’s, and you know, if you end up not spending it, you, you can spend it in activity on the client behalf, or you could really make a very nice profit on that account for the first year, but you just don’t know what it will take to manage and lead that client.

And you’ve gotta have a reserve for that. Yeah. I think that’s one of the biggest mistakes clients make, but it’s also one of the smartest things they can do is put in a big reserve.

Chip Griffin: Well, and and that also assumes that they’re accurately tracking what it costs to execute the work in the first place.

Well, yeah. Right. Because, you know, I don’t know about you guys, but my experience is most agencies are really bad at doing that. Mm-hmm. , particularly smaller agencies. Right, because they haven’t built in the processes. They’re not doing the time tracking. They’re not to the extent they, they look at profitability they look at it agency wide and not client by client. And if you’re not looking at it in a more granular way, you can’t make those intelligent pricing decisions so that you’re able to scale effectively. And more often than not, when I ask, uh, an agency owner tell me who your most profitable clients are, they almost always tell me their highest revenue clients.

But I can tell you from experience, that is almost never the case. Yeah. Almost never are your most, your highest revenue clients also your most profitable because you tend to overservice them because you’re afraid you’re gonna lose them. And so you just, you’ll do anything to keep them and so you tend to, to have a very low profit margin.

I’ve seen agencies that are straight up losing money on their largest clients. Why would you do that?

Ken Jacobs: Just insane. I saw something in the feed of, PR agency group the other day, da, da da da da, and the clients put it out to RFP and blah, blah, blah. And you know, we’ve been with them a long time. They’re our biggest client, and we discount our fees 20%.

Ugh. What, why, why, what, what is, what do you think that, so you’ve just decided you’re, you’re only gonna make 5% profit on that client if you’re a really good manager. It is, it is absolute insanity.

Chip Griffin: Well, and and, and a lot of owners talk themselves into the notion that, well, you know, it, that logo’s gonna help us win other business or, well, but we’ll eventually be able to grow it, or eventually we’ll be able to, to make up for that.

No, no, don’t do work that you can’t do profitably. Period. End story.

Marcel Petitpas: Yep. This is something I say all the time. Most agencies are suffering from indigestion, not starvation. They just happen to feel the same, especially on the P&L. Um, and you know, you mentioned Chip, like most agencies are really bad at time tracking, and in my experience, there’s two ways in which they can be bad at time tracking.

The first is that there is no compliance. No one’s really doing it. No one’s on top of their time sheet, so there’s just no data coming in. Usually that’s because nobody understands the importance of it. There isn’t buy-in among the team and it’s usually because there’s never been a clear explanation of how this data’s gonna help actually, uh, to your point earlier, can improve their lives, right?

If we can estimate things better, you work fewer evenings and weekends. We have more profitability, it’s less likely you get laid off if we lose a client or we miss an rfp, or we have a couple of dry months in the sales pipeline. The flip side of that, which I see all the time, is the team is very compliant on time tracking, but the accuracy of that data is bad because the incentive structures around time tracking are bad.

And mostly this is holding people accountable to a utilization target. So if this person without also exposing a counterbalancing metric, like an average billable rate or you know, a delivery margin or something like that. So now if Ken is only given 18 hours of work to do this week, but he knows he’s gonna have to meet with his manager at the end of the week and get grilled because he didn’t hit his utilization target.

Ken’s gonna take that 18 hours worth of work and he’s gonna turn it into 34 hours worth of work so he can hit his utilization target. And now you have, you know, oil in the well as it relates to the most important set of data in the business, which is the time tracking. So I’ve seen it go both ways and ultimately I think the, I had somebody ask me about this, how do you get the team to buy into this?

How do you get the team to buy into this? I said, Schedule a meeting, sit down and act like you are dumb enough to believe that the data’s accurate in the report and start making decisions and talking through decision making processes as if the data is real. And then your team will have to stop you and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Hold on a second. I didn’t fill up my time sheets last week very well. Or, you know, it didn’t actually take me that long. It took me a little bit less time because they’ll start to see how does this actually get used? How does it actually impact me. Because if they’re not putting time in to meet the budget, then you can go, oh, this is amazing.

I get to, you know, we can sell twice as much work and not change the size of the team. And they’ll go, whoa, hold on a minute. Actually it took me a lot longer than what you’re seeing in the data there. And then conversely, you might say, man, this is taking us twice as long as we thought we’re gonna have to either double our price or we’re gonna have to make some adjustments to the team, or we’re gonna have to stop selling the service altogether.

And they go, well, well hold on. Maybe, maybe it doesn’t actually take that long. There’s some ways to get it more efficient. I think it’s like force the conversation around truth, centralize the conversation around truth, and then the team realizes like, okay, the truth is what has to go in here and, and the truth is actually going to impact me in the best way.

Chip Griffin: Well, and, and there are two other things I would throw into this mix. One is, Frankly, a lot of agencies don’t do any time tracking at all. Right. So we’re, we’re not even to the point where we can get inaccurate information because they’re just not doing it. And, and if you don’t do it at all, and it’s, it’s sort of becoming…

Ken Jacobs: But it’s not inaccurate.

Chip Griffin: it’s become a hip thing in recent years for, for agencies to say, oh, well we don’t do time track, we don’t, you know, that, that’s, that’s the old way of doing it, you know, and, and there are some agency advisors out there who tell their clients, don’t do time tracking. You shouldn’t do it. I, I think that’s bonkers.

But, so that’s, that’s one. The other is that, that far too, agents, too many agencies take advantage of the software and decide to collect all sorts of detailed data on time that they never, ever were going to use. And so it makes the process so painful. Do you really need to know if someone spent this time on an email or a phone call with the client?

Probably not. You just need to know that they were doing work for the client and, and if, if you ask for more information than you really need, that also drives compliance way down. So you gotta have accurate information, you’ve got to encourage the truth, and if you do, you’ll be able to make some really great decisions for the business.

Ken Jacobs: Yeah, I think you’ve gotta make clear to your team there’s, you must complete it accurately and on time. Number one, no compromise. It’s essential to our business. Number two, even as you discuss utilization, you might say, Hey, at your level you should be at 77%, but we right now haven’t given you enough work for that.

So complete it accurately and know that as we work on all this business development and new business, we will be bringing in more business. And until we’re at 77 and 82 and whatever that is, we’re not gonna be building the team till we get there. But we don’t expect you or let me be more positive. We, we need you to complete your time sheets accurately. And if you’re underutilized, you’re not blamed, you’re not faulted, we will get out there and bring you more business and more projects to work on. Or if we feel you can take on more and more, we’ll delegate some hours things that were done by your boss now maybe be done by you, which drives profitability and that’s good for everyone.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. See, I, I, I don’t think you should ever talk to an employee about utilization rates at all because it’s not the employees, it’s not within the employee’s control. It’s your, as the manager, you’re deciding what they work on. So if there’s a problem with their utilization rate, that’s your fault, not theirs.

And so, right.

Ken Jacobs: But, but it goes to context and understanding because the, the problem is if they don’t get this, People always say they’re busy. I’m busy, I’m busy, I’m busy, I’m busy. If someone’s 77, 80% utilized and works on agency marketing and yeah, they’re really busy, maybe we don’t want to give them more work, but if someone’s at 67% utilization and they’re not helping with biz dev marketing or morale or whatever, like they, they need to be aware that we are gonna be giving them more work. So I, I think you do need to provide, to me that’s part of context and part of expectation. And look, anytime there’s a problem with time, it, it could be one of two things or three things. I guess it could be we didn’t budget enough hours. So we need to know that if, if every week we thought you’d spend 10 and you are productive and efficient and you are spending 13, we need to know that. We’ll only know that if you’re filling it out efficiently.

The other thing is some people, are more productive and efficient, better time managers than others. And so if we have done very similar projects and it’s taken the person around 10 a week and it’s always taken you 15, we need to talk about that. Maybe you need some professional development and help in being a better time manager because not everyone comes to it naturally, and I believe it’s an important professional skill in the agency business.

Chip Griffin: Absolutely. And, and, and understanding why it, why it’s taking them so much longer is also helpful. Yeah. Because sometimes it’s that they need professional development. Sometimes it’s that they’re, they’re integrating some step or piece that is unnecessary. Yeah. Right. And, and so helping them to understand, oh yeah, you don’t really need to, to do that.

This, this, this data point is sufficient. You don’t need to go that extra mile. You know, there’s all sorts of things like that. So you should absolutely be using it to ask those kinds of questions. And, and get that understanding because unless you’re sitting over someone’s shoulder 24 hours a day and you shouldn’t be, just so we’re clear about that, you’re not gonna know.

And so it, it, it starts by looking at this data to ask questions and, and explore further. So, uh, that’s actually, we’re, we’re just about out of time here, shockingly. We, we, we, I feel like we’ve just, you know, touched the tip of the iceberg here for the things that we could be talking about, but I do always try to make sure that we wrap up by 12:30 on Eastern time for all of these shows.

So before we do wrap up though, if someone is interested in learning more from either of you, maybe discussing some of these topics more in depth, where can they find you? Marcel?

Marcel Petitpas: Uh, they can head to Parakeeto.com and check out the Agency Profit Podcast anywhere that you listen to podcasts. And we post all kinds of content about this, you know, detailed guides on how to measure these metrics, how to do time tracking, how to implement the flywheel.

Uh, and you can also grab a free toolkit that teaches you how to implement the Agency Profitably Flywheel at parakeeto.com/toolkit. I’m also on LinkedIn. Feel free to reach out to me there if you have any questions and like to chat.

Chip Griffin: Perfect. Thank you Marcel. And Ken?

Ken Jacobs: Uh, jacobscomm.com is the website, ken@jacobscomm.com is the email.

I’m also on LinkedIn, but when you look, look for Ken Jacobs PCC, CPC, some of the initials after my name because there are a lot of Ken Jacobs on LinkedIn. We wanna get the right one.

Chip Griffin: There’s, there’s really only one Ken Jacobs, but LinkedIn apparently thinks there are others. But you are one of a kind, Ken, my goodness.

And, Ken, you also have a video podcast?

Ken Jacobs: I do. Taking the Lead where we get to interview great, respected leaders in the field. All from the PR world, but we don’t talk about PR. We talk about leadership and leading others and leading challenges, and I’m, I gotta, I’m just amazed some of the top leaders and agencies of all sizes spend time with us, that, that amazes me.

But they’re so generous with their thinking and they’re so humble and they’re so vulnerable and they’re always willing to sharethe missteps, if I remember to ask them, the missteps they had along the leadership journey. So yeah, you can find Taking the Lead on the website. And we have a Jacobs Consulting and Executive Coaching YouTube channel, and that’s where all those interviews are.

Thank you for reminding me to mention it.

Chip Griffin: Excellent. I’m your marketing agent. What can I say? You know, I’ll, I’ll send, I’ll send you a bill.,Ken.

Ken Jacobs: I was gonna say, do I have to pay it? Marcel, what’s the,

Chip Griffin: So if anybody is interested in seeing past episodes of this show or any of the other videos that I put out, you can go to small agency.tv and if you’d like to learn more about SAGA or access any of the free resources that we have, podcast articles, webinars, et cetera, go to small agency growth.com.

Again, I’ve been your host, Chip Griffin, the founder of SAGA, the Small Agency Growth Alliance, and I look forward to seeing you all back here again on a future episode.

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