Does your agency respond to RFPs for business development? If so, you have to dig into this episode where I get to speak to Yolanda Tucker, from Tucker Trained, about how to navigate the ins and outs of procurement, RFPs, and the nuances that can give your agency the edge in these otherwise painful business development efforts. She shares some of her tips on how agency owners can disrupt the RFP process to get ahead and what procurement teams look for in a potential winner of an RFP. Yolanda’s expertise in understanding where to find and how to navigate RFPs, contract negotiation, and procurement processes helps businesses go far beyond winning RFPs and how they can lead to higher revenue and profits. She also shares about the benefits of small business certifications, including women-owned, minority-owned, and veteran-owned, to name a few, that open doors to billions of dollars of business opportunities.

In this episode, Brandon and I talk about how playing with Legos can help explore any topic within a workshop. Brandon talks about how building and reverting back to your childhood playtime can build metaphors to answer prompts. By exploring what creativity means to each person, Serious Play can be implemented in an agency, corporate environment, or any other space, to dig into a business’s challenges. Building strategy and exploring values with Legos allows the process to remove the emotion from the results through a flow state under the facilitation of Brandon's expertise. This process allows the process to get at the nuanced insights from a group of people, without the meeting after the meeting.

In this episode, seasoned sales maven, Nikki Rausch shares some of the secrets in B2B sales, how to show up in opening relationships that lead to sales, and the full-circle benefits of asking for and making introductions and referrals. Her experience in setting up sales systems and guiding sales leaders in their systems is invaluable for agencies and salespeople alike. Nikki shares some secrets about how to create curiosity in account-based marketing, so we can learn to grow current accounts and increase the lifetime value of clients and offers.

In this episode, Marcel talks about how Parakeeto was born – how can smaller agencies leverage their data without enterprise software. Marcel talks about the value of the democratization of data within an organization where the cost of creating data has gone to zero and how to develop data management practices. We dug into systemic profitability issues in small agencies and the key metrics agencies should be watching out for to track predictable profitability. Marcel details the differences between delivery margins or the fundamental profitability of the offer and the cost of your services and what causes your delivery target to be below your goals. Similar to my coaching style, Marcel and his team don’t have a cookie-cutter approach to how an agency tracks numbers and defines success within an agency.

In this episode, I got to talk to Niki about how she intentionally transformed her agency prior to covid, and how these changes have helped them be more selective on client acquisition and more successful with client retention. She shares the secrets behind their team structure and how they win with company culture.

In this episode, I got to talk to Jody about what it’s like running one of the first fully distributed CPA firms, and their acquisition process by Anders CPA + Advisors. He talks about how they set out to launch the firm as a change agent in the space and how they flipped the billing model on its head in the creative agency CPA and advisory space. While Jody doesn’t run a creative firm, he lets us in on the immense value of niching down into vertices and how it proves to scalability. Learn the secret of when owners should really start leaning on outsourced CFO services and why. Finally, Jody shares some of the trending KPIs they see agencies actively monitoring.

In this episode, Jasz and I talk about the age-old tale of agencies treating their marketing and business development efforts as if they were their own client – and why that doesn’t work. She breaks down why a CRM is so vital to an agency, some of the most vital aspects of a good CRM, and various tricks on how to dig into your pipeline and stages of a business development process. We talk about at what point an agency should outsource their sales and marketing, vs. keeping it in-house and what the differences between the two options are. Finally, we explored various ways agencies can leverage ChatGPT to expedite some of our marketing research efforts.

In this episode, Carl shares his passion for people who run shops and create things and how he shifted from employee to running his own shop to now running Bureau of Digital, the greatest community of agency leaders. The biggest takeaways of this episode are some of the gems on how Carl ran nGen, his dev shop, but Carl also shares how hindsight really was 20/20 in understanding what he saw after opening nGen and some of the decisions his previous boss had made. He talks about how his agency model led to rapid growth by having clients pitch them and having the team choose the work they wanted to do and the type of clients they wanted to work with. Finally, Carl talks about the value of community in the agency space and how agency leaders should embrace their peers and not cut them off as competition.

In this episode, Monica and I spoke about what it’s like running a global team of content creators and project managers, and how they manage culture with intention as a remote team for more than 12 years. Her agency has scaled in a healthy way over the years, and as a leader, she talks about how important it has been to work smarter, not harder, and how they lean heavily on processes. Monica gave some insight as to how her team and clients prioritize human-made content for humans over leveraging robots for the sake of profit.

In this episode, Nick and I speak about his evolution from launching an agency to it exploding without the proper systems and people in place, and how he was able to turn that growth into both a sustainable and healthy agency and a booming side business of offshore talent. That side business eventually became his main focus as he helps agencies match with amazing offshore talent to help them scale their agencies.

In this episode, Patrice and I talk about the winding path that she took to get into the world of digital project management, how being fired (twice) set her on her way to mastering her destiny, why college may or may not be for everyone and some of the things agencies do (and don’t do) that are mind-boggling.

Having recently published a book, Culture Built My Brand, Mark and I spoke all about the driving force behind the book and how it helped define the success story of an agency previously in trouble. We spoke about how he and his agency took action to create intentional culture, drive out the negativity from the team, and build processes to deliver work for clients that were previously unheard of. Mark shares his and his team's bravery in how they faced tough times and as a result of an actual culture, are stronger than ever.

In this episode, Jenny and I talk about how an agency owner can benefit from being a digital nomad and what that means for their perspective on business and life. Jenny joined me from Argentina and talked about how her agency is going through a metamorphosis from focusing on web 2.0 technology and marketing and moving into web 3 solutions for their clients and how you can bring web 3 solutions to your clients.

In this episode, I chat with Mike about the evolution his agency, Second Melody, has taken in the 17 years it’s existed. We cover things like when to let an employee go, fighting the niche, saying no to clients, elevating employees as a leader, and the competitive nature of an agency owner.