Every agency is unique. Its miseries are not.
Tolstoy said it the other way: that happy families are all alike and every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. But after working inside more than 200 agencies and talking to maybe three times that number, I've found the opposite is true.
When you dig into how an agency actually operates, they are all different. The cultures, the founders, the work, the clients; no two look alike. But the problems? The problems are almost always the same.
And they're strange problems. They don't really exist anywhere else, not in this breed or at this magnitude. They come from something intrinsic to agencies: the collision between the chaos of running one and the impossibly high standard of the work itself. Every agency is trying to do something unreasonably close to perfect, inside an organization that is unreasonably difficult to manage. That tension is what drew me to this industry in the first place.
The other thing I can tell you after 200 engagements is that almost nobody manages to fix just one problem. The challenges inside an agency (from the moment a client comes on board through the final days of the engagement, sometimes years later) are all inter-connected. They form a system, and the system, well, it eats your initiatives for breakfast.
You can see the evidence in the gap between how an agency thinks it (should) operates (by reading its process documentation) and how it actually operates. The real delivery system gets forged in the furnace of time-based delivery, over-allocated teams, and short deadlines. It's not optimal. But it gets things done.
That might be the greatest tragedy I've seen: leaders and managers, trying to make things better, often make the battle for success harder. They have been my teachers, and often become friends. I'm grateful for the experience, and for what they taught me about how an agency really needs to operate.
This series is some of what I learned.
No. 37: The Amazingly Happy Clients
The lobby had vintage furniture and a beanbag chair in at least one of the conference rooms — not because it was trendy, but because that's what happens in the quiet moments between big wins. Every piece was a trophy from a good quarter. The founders were the kind of people who made amazing things for brands when given the chance, but like so many agencies, but all too often, they couldn't keep clients paying after the first big idea.
They'd built a homegrown project tracking system (a real investment) and it hadn't made things any better. Among the metrics they collected was client satisfaction. Two of the three founders and their project manager huddled around a screen with me as I looked at the numbers. Most of them were nines and tens. Which made no sense. You don't have a retention problem when your clients are that happy.
So I asked where the data came from. The CEO said the account people were reporting it.
Understanding what a number really means requires that you think about its source. I could even imagine the nines were true from the account person's perspective — what they're measuring is whether they had a good conversation, maybe even a pleasant one, or whether the client expressed happiness at finally getting the deliverable. But that's a very different thing from understanding what the client is thinking when the account person isn't in the room.
We were all still looking at the screen when I looked over at the CEO to see their reaction, to see whether they really got what they had just told me.
After a moment, the CEO looked up at me and said, "Yeah, I think you're right. The two clients we lost most recently were both nines."
I think this is the area that almost every agency under 50 people, and most of them under 100 do quite a poor job in. I'm not sure why that is, but I have a theory, which is there are other scorecards, such as getting the job done and getting paid, which can be a challenge in its own right, making payroll, and also subjective measures of like how good our work is. If those numbers look good, it may seem maybe like it's overkill to be measuring any other numbers, but in fact, there are much better numbers to use.
I've had a handful of agencies that I've worked with over the years where one of their biggest concerns was that they had just discovered that they had a very low net promoter score. NPS is something you should be fanatical about, and I can tell you every agency that became fanatical about, became a better agency as a result.
If we use my theory of what really goes on, then the story above is not about account people that lie, but about account people and others feeling quite happy that they got the basics done – that can absolutely feel like a nine any day of the week! And I consider all of the greatest miracles inside of agencies is that so much work gets done, despite what are usually widespread challenges.
The metrics problem shows up in other areas, such as timekeeping and also the way we set up project standards and allocated/estimated time to get work done. Here's a bit more from my book, UNMANAGED:
Metric: The Voices of Satisfaction
A great pair of qualitative metrics are the satisfaction metrics for teams and clients—essentially, how happy they are with their workplace and the work delivered, respectively. For reasons mentioned above, they work better as a pair because optimizing only one of them—making clients very happy, for example—can lead to teams that are completely burned out from unreasonable schedules, work, and client behaviors.
One of the most well-known qualitative measurements is NPS, the Net Promoter Score. You have likely seen it in many contexts, including follow-up on a customer service experience, like I just had with my TV service provider:
"On a zero to ten scale, how likely are you to recommend X (their service) to a friend?"
You can compile the scores of multiple clients (and/or your internal stakeholders) and arrive at an overall score that ranges between −100 and +100 using the categories detractor, neutral, and promoter.
You can use the same basic model for workers and teams, as follows:
"On a zero to ten scale, how likely are you to recommend a friend or colleague to work in your job in our company?"
We call this eNPS, the "e" standing for employee, but you should focus on workers and teams for your data, not managers.
I am always amazed at how few companies track these basic measurements. Just get them going.
