Arlen: 0:00

Welcome to the Agency Health Podcast, where we dig deeper into key topics on agency health. The what, the why, and the how. Mining actionable insights to build a better firm. And what is a healthy agency? A healthy agency is a firm that creates great value for its clients, its team, and its owners in a sustainable way. On this pilot episode, I'm joined by Lance Robbins, an HR leader, an advisor, remote work expert, keynote speaker, and podcast host. Lance has spent over 15 years Building strong business operations on people centric values and now shares his expertise through his workshops, training, and speaking. In this episode, we share the backstory for Agency Partners and the Agency Health Podcast. I'm Arlan with Agency partners and the host of the agency health podcast and really excited to have Lance, my buddy and a colleague with me today as well.

Lance: 1:00

Yeah. Great to be here. Excited. Thank you for the opportunity to be a part of this, this pilot episode. Good to spend time with a friend and a colleague and dive in more to. What agency health is and what you're doing here. So this is great.

Arlen: 1:14

And Lance, tell me, tell me a little bit about what you're up to now and maybe anything that jumps out at you about our work together in the past.

Lance: 1:23

Yeah. Well, okay. So for, for listeners here Arlen recruited me to the web tech agency world. I was serving as a chief of staff, essentially, in a agricultural And it was a time in my life when I really needed, I really needed some change for just managing my, my family and my personal life. I needed more flexibility and more autonomy. Arlen gave me that opportunity by bringing me over to the agency he was working with at the time. And we spent collectively three or four years together, working on growing that team, seeing it, seeing it grow up in 200 plus team members. And I always appreciated the, the, the caring approach, the, the people first values that Arlen really championed and empowered me to champion as well. And we had a really good run together. It was a lot of fun and yeah, outside of that, of course, we've, we've remained friends and stayed in touch and you've been a big supporter. Advocate and cheerleader for me as I've launched my own independent fractional business, a fractional head of remote and people and cultural leadership engagements that I've been pursuing. And I've appreciated the insights and the encouragement that you've shared along the way, getting mine up off the ground and was absolutely thrilled when you asked if I'd be a part of having this conversation with you as, as you get yours going. I also run a podcast called fractional.

Arlen: 2:50

Yeah, an inspiration to me here. For sure.

Lance: 2:54

It's, it's been a really, really fun and great learning experience. So yeah, Arlan, tell us a little bit about, about your journey into the world of agencies and how you got from there to here.

Arlen: 3:06

So as I tell people, Lance, I never imagined growing up that, you know, I would start an agency one day or, or be in the agency space. I'm not sure I was even that aware of the agency world as a kid, but I've always really Technology and design and so yeah, as a, as a 12 year old getting into that, getting into the web and then in my teens starting to do some freelancing and, and into college that expanding to the point where I needed more help, you know, there's more client work to do than I could do myself. And so like many stories I've heard, I became an accidental freelancer. agency owner and ran that studio for five years, always small, but a growing team and, and had a great experience working with a couple other agencies as their technology partner and with a lot of our own clients as well across the country. So really formative experience in business and in the agency world. And, and then from there, I, I spent some time outside of the agency space, which. I think it taught me a lot about sales and marketing in, in a fast paced, rapidly growing manufacturing and sales company. And, and then got back into the agency world. A, a mutual friend of ours, Jonathan Wold, he was working with XWP. And just like I, I had the chance to tap someone that I trusted and knew, Lance. Jonathan, before that, tapped me, somebody that he knew and trusted to, to join the team there. And I was at XWP for a little over eight and a half years, cumulatively. And we had quite, quite a journey from 25 when I joined up to 125 at the peak. And, and also going through some seasons of, you know, up and down of contraction. I think the company right now is, is around 65 people doing pretty well. So, that, that journey helped me understand a lot about what can work well in an agency and, and the things that help them be successful. It also helped me see how an agency can be blindsided by threats and risks that really damage it, that, that cause the loss of a lot of profit, that can result in job losses and a lot of stress for people. And so, that began developing my passion for, for agency health and I think. All of this is rooted in, in people, in a value for people, that every, every single person is inherently valuable regardless of what they do or don't do, or contribute to the world or don't contribute to the world, and, and a desire to make life better for them. And so if If you want people to have a good experience, if you want people to have a good quality of life, then if they're working in an agency, they're working for an agency, or maybe they're being served by an agency, you want that agency to be healthy. And, and that really developed my passion for the topic that this podcast is, is all about agency health and how can everyone win? How can people have that long term quality of life that comes from a healthy organization?

Lance: 6:08

So what you're pursuing Aligns not only with your experience and expertise, but it's a strong match for you as with personal values that you care deeply about. Because there's a lot of stories, a lot of examples of agencies that chew people up and spit them out, right? Yeah, you know, grow and contract, go and contract, and it can be a really volatile environment for an employee, for, for a team member. And so, you know, part of what you care about is, is making that. A better experience for people. And I, I hearing that coming through.

Arlen: 6:38

Absolutely. I mean, it, it really starts with that. If you have a team that's well taken care of, if, if you as an agency leader or owner are taking care of yourself, then that enables you to create a great experience for clients, enables you to create more value in the world. But it is very circular, right? Because if the business is not profitable, if the business is not doing well, then it's really hard to take care of the people. It's really hard. to, you know, work sane hours and have a reasonable level of stress. So I see these things both feeding each other, you know, having healthy people, having healthy, healthy internal culture and operations, profitability, but also, also having healthy fundamentals of the business to support all of that. They, they go back and forth.

Lance: 7:24

Yeah. One of the things I, I tell founders is. The number one thing you can do for employee experience is be profitable. It's really, really hard to create a good experience for people when financially you're not able to do that. So this all ties together in a holistic view of health for the agency.

Arlen: 7:42

So come coming out of my last role at XWP as, as chief people officer, there were two paths that I could take really. Cause I, I wanted to bring. More support to more agencies, kind of similar to what you found yourself doing, you know, taking that expertise on people experience on remote work on how companies can operate better and sharing that with a wider audience. And, and I really had those two paths. I could go down this path of focusing deeply on people experience or maybe focus more on, you know, agency operations and profitability and these things. And what I concluded is that if you really care about the people, you actually have to start with the operations. You have to have a business that is able to produce value for everyone. And then you can invest more in a great experience. You can invest more in the things that, that may benefit you. Make people enjoy what they're doing and reduce their stress. But at the end of the day, if you don't have great projects to work on, if you're not paid fairly, paid well, if, if you don't know if you're going to have a job next month, then your quality of life is not going to be that great. So start with that and then work out from there to more, more things that impact people.

Lance: 8:53

I love it. I love it. So agency health, the title of this podcast, tell me a little bit more about the inspiration for this podcast and, and help us unpack and understand. The concept of agency health, you know, what it is, what it isn't, why it matters and so on.

Arlen: 9:09

Yeah. And, and I think even stepping back, looking at businesses as a whole or organizations of any kind, really, they exist to create value. What is value? You know, it's, it's kind of an abstract concept, but it's usefulness. to someone, right? So they take, organizations take people's time, money, expertise, and knowledge, and then they put people together with all these things and, and they need to take those assets and, and make something more out of them. So just like a bunch of building materials lying on the ground, they're worth something, right? Like they're worth something, but they're worth a lot more when you put them together And build a house out of them, a house, something someone can use and, and get that utility, that usefulness out of. And in the same way, a business, an agency in this case, is about creating value. And, and so a healthy agency is creating great value for its clients, for its team members, for its owners. In a sustainable way, I think you mentioned earlier, Lance, how agencies will sometimes staff up, you know, for a couple of big clients, and then maybe those, those relationships don't work out long term, and then they fire a bunch of people, let a bunch of people go, I think that kind of volatility is really hard. environment to, to be healthy within. So I think that long term perspective of sustainability is, is really important here. So value for everyone sustainably, that's what a healthy agency is about.

Lance: 10:41

As you mentioned this up and down, the sustainability. There's also, it comes to my mind here that there's also a lot of friction unintended that hurts the health of an agency when you see the up and down. Cause it's not just about, you know, the dollars to bring someone on. And then when we need to reduce costs, we let that person go. What are some of those other collateral damages, the, the, the unintended effects of the up and down that you address or that you think about when you think about agency health?

Arlen: 11:10

Yeah. I mean, an agency is, is taking people, their knowledge, their expertise, their time, and building something, you know, it could be an identity, it could be a user experience, it could be software, any number of things. But, if you think about the teams that you have been on, that have been most effective. Almost invariably, that is based on trust. It's based on a safe environment where people can make mistakes, learn from those, they're not penalized for taking risk, they are encouraged to share what they're learning, they're encouraged to support each other. That comes from that trusting environment. And that takes time to build. So when you have a lot of turnover in an organization, especially a very team based organization, like an agency, it's, it's really hard to ever build that value flywheel where you are able to have a group of people that are really effective. And, and what I've seen is. I mean, a great team, they, they say, you know, the best software engineers, 10x, 100x, 1000x, maybe the performance of mediocre ones. I think there's a big multiplier there with an effective team, with that trust, those relationships. So if you want to create the most value for clients, be able to bill at the highest rates, you know, capture the most value, having teams of people that have worked together for years, That know each other really well, give you a huge edge in the market. So that's, that's one aspect of what you lose when you don't have that sustainability and stability.

Lance: 12:43

So how would somebody know, like if I'm an agency owner, what would I look at to say, Hey, my agency is actually not that healthy. I mean, there's the obvious things that are probably way lagging as far as, Oh, we have no money in the bank or you have serious attrition, but. You know, is it easy to tell if an agency is healthy or is it tough?

Arlen: 13:02

So I think to your point there, there are some ways in which it's pretty easy to tell if an agency is healthy and, and that doesn't mean that every person on a team will see those things. We all have different perceptions. But, but things like the cash on hand, you know, from, from the perspective of a principal or a partner, someone who can see all the data available, there are some things like that, that yes, they're lagging indicators, but they're still important indicators. You know, if, if we have six months of cash in the bank to pay for operations, then we can make good long term decisions. Whereas if we have four weeks, we might have to take any project that comes our way that ultimately is going to be somewhat toxic and maybe not that profitable. So there are some indicators like that. I think the challenge is that although agencies are simple, there are so many dimensions of value. And as someone who has been on a leadership of an agency, a leadership team of an agency for years, I think the You're so busy across so many things, you know, your, your time is really squeezed. So the ability to think about and keep track of all the inputs to those lagging indicators it's, it's really tough. You can't keep across all those things. So yes, you might see some obvious pain points. But that is one of the difficulties, is all the ways value can be created and lost in an agency. There's quantitative, qualitative ways to measure that. You have a whole set of stakeholders. You have customers, clients, and their experience. You have your team. You have the partners and owners. And they all see and perceive value differently. It can be pretty overwhelming, so measuring in a repeated fashion, steadily, that's even more challenging, right? Because agencies are dynamic, they're changing, the definition of value changes. So overall, it's not rocket science, but it is pretty complicated, and that's where I see a lot of agencies struggling, is, is, Getting across that full sense of value. And one more point there is that like any organism, a business, an agency has all these interconnected parts. So if one thing starts going off the rails, like for example, you have an issue where customers are paying a bit later, a bit later, maybe they're under some pressure that has a flow on effect. So any of these areas of agency health. Maybe you're watching nine out of ten, but that one thing you're not watching, and even for two years, no problems, right? But then at some point, that tenth item that you're not really keeping an eye on can come and bite you, and maybe you have a customer leave owing you a lot of money, maybe slowly eroding utilization catches up with you, you know, just one, one factor. Can mess up the whole picture, right? Just like getting gangrene in your foot, you know, and spreading up your leg.

Lance: 15:52

And because of that interconnectedness and there being so many moving parts, do you think that's why it can be hard not just to assess it as, as a, as a leader, but also improve it then, right? What lever do I pull on? How do I, you know, without breaking the other parts, what do you see the, the principles, the directors. Running up against when they're trying to take action to improve things, but they're not getting the results that they want.

Arlen: 16:17

I think maybe the most common problem is being so close to the agency itself. So when you, when you see something day in, day out, we experienced this when we write a piece, right? And we've tried to edit it. We wrote it ourselves, but it's really hard to find the grammatical issues. Maybe a sentence that doesn't make much sense. We're too close to it. We, we can't really tell. So having somebody outside of that flow is really helpful in seeing things more clearly. Another piece of that, though, is that anyone working full time in one agency, they don't have exposure to maybe the challenges and successes of a lot of other agencies, at least not very closely. So that insight that can come from exposure to a lot of agencies operating in different ways and what's working and what's not across those. So you put those two things together. A little bit of distance is hard. to develop when you're working in an agency and you're just looking at one agency, right? That's all. So those two pieces can make it difficult to really understand cause and effect to see where the problems might be and even know what stones to turn over.

Lance: 17:23

You've probably seen agencies come and go. You've seen some flare up and be exciting for a little while, disappear. You've seen some hang around for a long time. And stay relatively small. We've seen others in the space that we worked in really skyrocket and, and achieve what seems to be like very outlier type success. Why do you care about bringing this to agencies in general?

Arlen: 17:49

I, I think what I see people focusing on tends to be. Operational efficiency, right? Like, which, which is valuable and a part of agency health. So there's a lot of people thinking about and working on, on that. And, and then people, sales and marketing and, and this wider growth topic of helping agencies grow. And again, valuable, helping people move in the direction they want to move. I think what's missing is this baseline, steady state, objective look at, you know, are we healthy holistically? What are the things that are holding us back? What are the threats that may be about to blindside us? What are the opportunities we have that, maybe it's not even the main opportunity we're focused on, right? But if we can put a little bit of time over here, improve this five percent, reduce this threat over here ten percent, a few other levers that we pull a little bit, right? Then we end up with more operating profit, we end up with less stress. Our ability to push on those big things, whether that be growth or maybe repositioning or, you know, opening a new vertical that you're focusing on or whatever it may be, you have so much more bandwidth to do that when you have more cash in the bank, when you have less stress about your business overall. So that's the gap that I see, right? Like I see people pushing deeply into operational efficiency and into growth and sales and marketing. But I think every agency would benefit from a little bit of ongoing help, just a little bit of ongoing help to see their agency more clearly, to understand the whole organism and how it's working together. And, and with that healthier state, they can push faster, better towards their big goals.

Lance: 19:31

So when you, when you get, Talking to a founder, the president of an agency, and you kind of see they have this interest in improving the health of their agency. How do you start thinking about it? What, how do you approach this agency health concept? How do you start talking to founders about this? What, what is the message that you want them to hear?

Arlen: 19:51

Yeah, I mean, I, I think, I think the first thing you have to understand is, is where you are trying to go. Not all agencies and, and all agency leadership teams have somewhere new they want to get. Maybe they just want to be just as healthy today, just as healthy in five years as they are today. Right? And that's, that's their win. But whatever future state they want, you want to have that clearly in mind. Because it's pretty hard to get somewhere when you don't know where you're going. So, yeah. They don't have that clear, I would want to help them to think about what they value, what's important to them, where they're trying to go. And that doesn't need to be a big multi day discovery or an offsite or something, right? Like we can focus on the things you already know, but maybe haven't made conscious, right? So let's be clear on where you want to go. And then, and then the next step is really to begin based on that definition of future success. Looking at the most critical aspects of health across your whole business, like that includes your business plan, it includes your core processes, it includes people, it includes sales and marketing, clients engagements, and your finances. Those are the big six areas as I see it. So we look at all of those and based on where you want to go, how are you doing? I have in my mind typically 40 or 50 factors. That are not necessarily levers to pull, but like you said, they're lagging indicators for the most part, some of them leading indicators, to see, how are you doing today? If you want to be here in three years, five years, how are you doing today? And then we can start saying, okay, based on that gap, what are the threats, what are the opportunities that are going to help you move there? the fastest. And, and once you have in your mind, hey, this is the top priority one or two things that I can work on. You don't, can't work on 10 things at once, right? Let's just pick a few, maybe a quick win and, and maybe something that's going to take you a little longer to work on. You want to step back and just, at a low level, observe across the whole business. Keep monitoring those key areas of potential threat and opportunity so nothing does blindside you and knock you off the path to your goals. And then periodically, you know, you're going to solve those, those one or two priorities. You're going to make things a lot better there. And then the question is, okay, what's next? What do we work on now? There's also a process there of steadily improving your visibility into your agency. For example, you may not be doing anything to collect feedback from your customers, from your clients. So, you know, you know if people renew or not, you know, sort of what people tell your account manager on calls. But there's no objective way that you're either quantitatively or qualitatively assessing how happy is this client? How likely are they to be working with us in one year, two years? Down the road. So maybe we put together a program, something lightweight, actionable to better assess on an ongoing basis. Maybe that's monthly, maybe it's quarterly. How happy are our customers? How likely are they to keep doing business with us? What's making that better for them, what's detracting from their experience. So that's one example of like, let's shine some light here because customer attention is hugely important to our health. So we want to understand that better. And so over time, you improve your monitoring throughout the whole business. And that helps you look towards the levers, the things you can actually do that ultimately impact that operating profit and, and sustainability.

Lance: 23:11

So you're over time looking for patterns. You're looking for. Trends, you and I have probably both bought the template or bought the, the webinar that's gonna give us the answer so we can like take our business to the next level. But it sounds like right, that's not the way this really works. Right? It's not just a Yeah, a buy it and fix it.

Arlen: 23:29

That, that's a great point. And, and I think there are people who are doing, as far as I can tell, I, I haven't necessarily experienced all of these service offerings, but there are people who are doing a great job, it seems providing, you know, a holistic, deep. One off audit of your agency and then telling you, okay, here are the levers that are going to help you the most and you might spend 25 grand for that all up front and you know, you get a bunch of good advice and I think there's a place for that. You know, there's clearly a need for that in the market. What I'm talking about is a gap where one, you may not have the headspace to work with someone at that level. You may not have the cash on hand that you want to invest at that level yet. But you do want to be healthier. You do want to have more operating profit to work with. You want to be able to take better care of your team and your clients. Maybe you're stuck in some places that you see clearly, but maybe not. Maybe things seem okay. And so yeah, to your point, we do a holistic but kind of minimally comprehensive look to kick us off, identify the top few threats or opportunities to, to start chewing on. But it really is, the magic is in that long arc of having pretty inexpensive, to be honest, pretty inexpensive ongoing support. And maybe you get that from a coach, maybe you get that from a CPA, but typically these people are focused on one aspect of your agency. And not the whole picture, which is really where, where my passion lies and, and what this podcast is about. So,

Lance: 24:53

yeah. So speaking of what this podcast is about, if I'm a listener and I thought this was pretty cool, I want to know more, what else could I expect to hear in the coming months from this podcast that would be valuable for me? Yeah.

Arlen: 25:04

So what I really want to do through, through the episodes coming up over time is, is give you a chance to, as a listener to get to meet some key experts in the space. Also. To talk to some, some agency owners, agency leaders who have had some meaningful experience dealing with either certain categories of, of health in their agency or, or overall. And, and we can dive a bit deeper into specific topics. You know, we mentioned client retention, it could relate to client credit. It could relate to making sure that you're on the right path. So if you ever want to sell your business in the future, you can do that. It could relate to how you strengthen your ability to attract. The right kinds of customers. So looking in very practical terms that how can I improve the health of my agency and getting to know some of the experts who can shed some light on that. And, and some of them may be people you would consider working with personally whether you do or not, they have some things to share. So that's really what this podcast is about. Going deeper into the topics that will help you improve the health of your agency and move towards. The future that you really want to create.

Lance: 26:13

And the assumption I'm making is that this is really valuable for a listener profile of someone who is an agency owner, founder, leader, senior executive. Is there anyone else that you feel like this podcast could, could really reach and give some valuable insights to?

Arlen: 26:29

Yeah, I mean, I think the, that is the primary audience, right? Like anybody in a leadership role in a digital agency, primarily, there may be a lot of overlap for agencies that don't think of themselves as digital for, for creative agencies of other marketing agencies. But that is the primary audience here is, is people who have the ability to really influence the health and direction of the agencies that they work in and have an appetite to make things better. I think these topics apply probably to agencies of It's just about any size, but when I think of the agencies that will get the most value from this, I'm imagining, you know, agencies that are to a size where there's maybe a leader of each major area of the agency. So you have someone leading delivery operations, you know, you have somebody leading. Here, here, marketing and sales. So that might be 25 people. It depends on the agency, but at that point you start to have more, more leverage to improve your operations, more deeply people with more headspace to work on that as an owner, you also have less. Direct visibility into each of those areas of your business. So there can be more value in systematically monitoring the health of each of those departments or areas of your business as well.

Lance: 27:45

And boiling this down, if you could finish this statement. The future I want for digital agencies looks like.

Arlen: 27:52

Yeah, it looks like an experience where digital agencies are no longer blindsided by preventable threats because they just have that visibility. You know, they see all the normal things that hurt agencies and They also have a much clearer picture of their opportunities to add value, to create value, to capture value. They, they have control of their destiny in a, in a much bigger way. Not just a snapshot one time, but every month, every quarter, they are exposing reality, able to act on it, to move towards their goals.

Lance: 28:27

Great. And so if somebody wants to learn more about this topic, go deeper in the agency health concept, Yeah. Where are some places where they can find resources? Where can they find out more about your work and the content you're putting out here?

Arlen: 28:38

Yeah. So if you, if you go to my website, agency. partners, I do have an agency health guide there that's a pretty substantial deep dive into the six areas that I mentioned into some of the key metrics that, that I look at. My playbook is, is basically out there for free. For you to consume. And if you have questions about that any of those topics, I'm happy to hear from you. You can also subscribe to my newsletter, where we'll be going deeper into those topics. And of course, this podcast, talking to other experts and agency leaders. You can subscribe here to stay tuned for our upcoming episodes.

Lance: 29:17

Great. Well, thank you, Arlan, for inviting me to be a part of this. Exciting to get this launched and excited to see where this goes for y'all.

Arlen: 29:24

Yeah. Thanks so much, Lance, for joining me today and for the, the journey we've had. I'm excited to carry on and, and to create some new content. Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Agency Health Podcast. Up next is a four episode miniseries on exit strategy, how to begin with the end in mind. You'll find more details in the show notes. Take care, and be well.