Arlen: 0:03

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 episode, I'm delighted to be joined by Piotr Delawski, my co founder and the technical lead at Agency Partners. Piotr has been building for the web for two decades and has spent much of that time in the agency world. He hails from Poland. And today, of course, is a little bit of a different episode. We're normally chatting with guests, agency owners, experts in the space. Today we want to give you a little bit of a window into our team, what's happening behind the scenes, and we'll start out with how, how we met. We've worked together for a number of years before agency partners, and, uh, we have some interesting memories we've made together. So, yeah, we actually started, right, around the same time at X.

Piotr: 1:11

Yeah, it was 2020, 2015, right? Quite some time ago.

Arlen: 1:18

So, you were, at the time, working with another agency, actually, right? So X5,

Piotr: 1:25

yes, it was actually, it was XHTML stack in today's, which then changed his name to X5, what we know right now, X5. Yeah, this was another agency and another different way of working. Independent way and then I had the opportunity to work on a project with XWP in a different setup. So being part of a team and then having you as a project manager, if I remember correctly, right?

Arlen: 1:53

Yeah, that was an interesting experience for me. I generally work with smaller businesses and midsize businesses, mostly smaller businesses, actually in agency serving them. And so working with News Corp, that's where we were, right? Working with News Corp Australia on the biggest. WordPress migration, one of the biggest WordPress migrations to date at that point, 10 years ago. Was that a new kind of experience for you as well?

Piotr: 2:19

It was new, it was transformative, it was Like a highlight of my career and it was like a very interesting experience, not just from the point of view of like technical side, working with such big code base and hefty project is one thing. I was owning just one piece of that part of the front end. But also having the opportunity to work with so many great people, experts in the field and also traveling to Sydney twice and seeing how those companies, how other people out there live. For me from rather small town in Poland, it was like a really huge deal. And you were there for a week or two each time you went? Actually, I was there for a bit longer. So first time it was three weeks and second time it was two weeks. It was challenging, especially for my family, for my wife and kids. My oldest kid was then one and a half years old, or two years old, and then the younger one was just one. It was quite a change, but we thought that this is an opportunity that doesn't happen often. It was important for me to, for us all, to take this opportunity and really Learn those other things, see the other side of the world and also practice English, speaking English back then was really hard for me. I was good at writing, but I struggled with spoken word because that's something that I

Arlen: 3:58

haven't got a chance to practice a lot. And then you add Aussie slang to that and all the other things, right?

Piotr: 4:04

Yeah, actually, I, I usually hear that my accent is some kind of a mashup of everything that you can think of. So a bit of. U. S., a bit of British, a bit of Aussie sometimes, I don't know how much truth is it in there, but I know that it's very strange.

Arlen: 4:23

To me, as an American, it comes across as just clear and understandable, right? So, yeah, it's maybe from the world, like you say. That does bring in some interesting challenges. I always have respect, because working at XWP for eight and a half years with colleagues from 25 plus countries, a good share of our team, English was not their first language. And it's hard for me to understand the depth of that. But having lived in other countries, it does add a big layer of maybe stress and complexity to your professional relationships. So, yeah.

Piotr: 4:59

Yes. And on top of that, not just language, but also the cultural differences and how you react to different situations. And I never forget people asking me back in Australia, how am I doing? I wanted to tell everything about my day so far and how I slept and everything. Because that's what you usually do in Poland. No one really asks you about how you're doing. If they are not really wanting to know, they don't want to know. Right. And, and I was like, it's actually just no, Hey, good morning. That's it. So. Those are the funny things that you only learn by, by being immersed in those different cultures. So, yeah.

Arlen: 5:42

One of the things I remember most, because I wasn't on site there in Australia. And although we were working on the same engagement, uh, I think at, at the peak, there were maybe 25 people from XWP working on that engagement. So we didn't spend a lot of time interacting. I just had the impression that you are an engineer people trusted and you, Added value that was significant and meaningful that was probably not a lot more that I picked up working together there, but I remember WordCamp Europe and meeting for the first time in person and gelato in particular because I love gelato. So I have this picture of like at night in Vienna getting gelato with a larger group of people and whether some of that is even fabricated or not, that's early memory I associate with with you. And so we spent some time there. Uh, at XWP together, you had a stint away at Automattic for a little while, and we were able to, uh, convince you to come back to XWP again, somehow. Yeah. So, for, for a few more years.

Piotr: 6:48

It, it looks like agency work, and this kind of work is a bit more convincing to me, or interesting, so. There's always this thinking that the grass is greener on the other side and the draw to product. Yeah, so a large company, stable position, so many benefits and it feels it is really great, but we also feel like at least me. I felt locked in a golden cage, to be honest, not that much challenges. And most importantly, I, I didn't feel I have really an impact and, and what I do. When I heard that XRP is willing to invite me back. I was really happy about it, but I decided to move back.

Arlen: 7:36

We were really excited to have you come back, so we missed you. And I think in the agency world, there are key people that you work with that you can just rely on. I mean, you know that when they say they're going to do something, they do that thing. You know that they are going to think. Beyond the requirements brief, they're going to think hard about the problems and what is the best way to solve this for the client. And that's something I've always really appreciated about you, that you have some earnestness about your work. You don't take life too seriously or your work too seriously, but you're always looking for that better way. Quality is something you really valued. So working on these websites with a lot of scale for major publishers, major enterprises. I think your skill set and mindset fit really well in that environment.

Piotr: 8:26

I think so as well. And I'm really happy that that you think. Of me like that. I don't know where is it coming from to be honest. I have always been a kind of a perfectionist unless until I learned that it's not really trade is not a good thing. It's rather she's rather fight with that, but. Those traces of perfectionism are still somewhere deep in me. I like what I do. I like the technical challenges and being able to focus on them and sometimes go beyond of what is, what was even requested. I know it doesn't really work well with agencies again and this kind of a work, but it feels like. This is something that a client will need anyway, and we'll appreciate. And it actually worked out more times than not. The thing that I worked on was actually used and needed over the time. I also learned that there's also the need this balance between work. and non work activities and family and everything else. So it took me years to somehow reduce the professionalism level. I try to be better on this front.

Arlen: 9:45

It is challenging when you care. That was a theme in general at XWP was. Discontentment that I felt even early on, and I know it's not been long. We started working together in October. So tell me a little bit about why this now. Why are you not working inside an agency today?

Piotr: 10:05

I think it's really ties into what we just. Talked about so this trip to the big product company, and I realize it's not what I'm looking for. I've been working in the agency for that many years, and I really like those challenges and that you can work on on on various projects for various clients, but in every case, I was. I didn't feel the really like the full impact on what I'm doing it. I haven't felt the control that I would like to have over direction of what I'm doing and how things are done. So when I spoke back in October last year and offered me the role, this opportunity to co found this business. I feel like this is finally getting into, I'm finally in the position where all my desires to have more control, to have more to say, to shape what I'm working on and take full responsibility for that on one hand, but also have that responsibility. That's also a good thing and work on my own terms. In this case, it was very attractive. And I felt like this is In terms of my personal life and personal life, I felt like this is the best moment so far for this kind of a decision for this kind of a end of war. And yes, and so far, I feel like this has been a very good decision. Yeah. How did you feel about that? About change introducing me to the company.

Arlen: 11:44

As you know, I'd been on the journey for. About a year so far, still very early in that journey, right, trying to figure out after my eight and a half years at XWP, how can I add the most value in the agency space? It's a space that I know and I care a lot about and so seeking to understand better the problems and the opportunities and the connections with ways I can help. But doing that alone, I, it shouldn't be surprising to me, right? Being a chief people officer, leading teams, I'm very team oriented. So working entirely on my own is actually not very attractive to me. And I don't do my best work. So I've been thinking about who, who could work with me. And there are very few people in the world that I would jump at the opportunity to work with this closely and be confident that, hey, it's going to be, it's going to be good. So, when we were chatting and you indicated that you might be making a change in your direction and in your journey. Yeah, it was like zero hesitation. I didn't need to talk to anybody. I didn't need to think about it. It was just obvious to, to bring up to you that would you maybe be interested in collaborating? And it's been a lot of fun the last few months. I definitely feel like the momentum is entirely different when you're able to collaborate and have someone to bounce ideas off of, have someone else who cares about the work you're doing, and maybe hitting that sweet spot, as you say, of having a lot of responsibility and potential to make an impact, but also. Having someone to share that journey, I don't, I don't know that I'll ever try the solopreneur thing in my life again after this, because I just see such a beautiful contrast and working as a team versus working by myself comparing the year before and the four months we've been together. But really, why agency partners to me is about. Seeing how a lot of agencies struggle and they have a vision, they have value they can add to the world, but it's hard for them to make that a reality. And so the stress of the owners, the stress of the team. The ups and downs that they're experiencing are tough. And I think in many cases, it doesn't need to be that way. It's not a requirement that people go through all that pain to get to something better, or to even just keep doing what they're doing. It's not a requirement of agency life to have that constant stress and up and down. I think what we're really wanting to do is to help people adopt the frameworks and the insight and the ways of thinking, connect them with resources, provide them with tools that help them to remove a lot of that pain that maybe isn't necessary. And that really gets into what you find meaningful in your work as well. What would you describe as the threads? That make work really rewarding for you.

Piotr: 14:42

On one hand. I really resonate with what you say. I've been on the other side for so many years at agency and have seen the ups and downs and all the problems that real life problems people had just because of that. You don't really like seeing people being let go. It's really challenging. So on one hand, Like for the more, more idealistic point of view, I really find it very rewarding to the working on the service and product that hopefully you will allow agencies and people within those agencies have a better life, maybe sounding very high level and compatible, but it's not really like that it is providing means to the agency owners. So that they make the right decisions and because of those decisions, people can be safer and what they do and are better treated. So that's, that's one side of the coin, I would say. And then the other is that. As I mentioned, I really needed this moment. I knew this. I always liked to create things, to build things, to have control over what I do, to, to, to build this masterpiece. I remember back in the XWP, our first project for News Corp, some people were laughing even that I built my, how do you call it? Legacy. There's this, my legacy that I leave in the code base because it's so monumental. It was back then. I know that it was just. Over engineered, I know it was just too much, but I feel like this is somewhere in inside of me that I want to build something that lasts. I want to create things out of nothing. So you have this raw material. In our case, it's an idea and I like to build something out of this idea. Something that is useful. Some. A product, a thing, and I've been always this kind of a jack of all trades and master of none. That's what I would probably, uh, describe myself, um, uh, you know, quite often. I did so all sorts of things, uh, in my life. And in terms of the things that are related to software, to the computers, it was, I did graphic design, 3D design, uh, print materials, logos. I even took part in, in logo contests and won some of them. I built, I, I led my own small web agency or firm. I was just alone and building websites from scratch, including the design. And then I've been working now on, when I joined XWP, I was working on the front end. Solely on the front end. It was back in the days where there was the React. So the front end was actually HTML, CSS and JavaScript. So I've been working on that and not really doing anything else. No backend, no design. And then in my second season. LXWP, I was getting more into the backend and then I became a backend engineer or a full stack engineer. And so I feel like I, I can grasp a lot of different things and build something out of them. And it's very attractive to me to be able to do those things. To create something that that can fly.

Arlen: 18:13

Because it's that thing more than the skill set that motivates you. Right? It's more what you're able to produce. And so being able to draw on that broader skill set makes it even more interesting and rewarding than that really narrow focused work.

Piotr: 18:27

I would say it is more like realizing that with the small, still quite small skill set that I have, I'm able to build something that is out there. Like my first, first experience in web development, it was when I was in, I guess some like end of elementary school, like I was around probably 12 years old. It's like the system education system here is a bit different. So I was probably around that and I was, I realized that I can just open up a notepad on my PC and I can create a website and I can publish it on the internet and it's accessible to everyone. I didn't even have a broadband connection. I had to dial in. It was like total different. I can create something of nothing. And, yeah, so it's about the art of creation. That's what I really, really like.

Arlen: 19:24

Apparently you got hooked because here you are all these years later.

Piotr: 19:29

Yeah, the funny thing is that when I try to do things with my hands, do something in wood or in, in some actual raw material, it's not always working out this as I like it to be. So it's, I, I lack some of those skills for sure.

Arlen: 19:46

My wife and I joke about this because I love creating things. But I like having an undo button. I like to be able to make changes. And I started in front end design and development in my career. And that going back to IE6, right? The guess and check where you change things, you save, you refresh. Like this cycle is to me, very addictive of progressing a product and constantly seeing, okay, how do people respond to that? How does the browser respond to that? Whatever it is. It's. Yeah, it's really rewarding and really exciting as well. And that gets into the problem that we're really solving at Agency Partners. I mean, the problem space we're interested in, I think, is is fairly broad. It's maybe a kind of business and helping them be healthier and more sustainable, but it does narrow in quite a bit in terms of the exact problem space where maybe we can add the most value. How do you think about the problem space that we talk about internally and the kinds of things that we're doing? What problem are we helping solve for agencies?

Piotr: 20:54

Yeah, so I would say at a very high level, we are trying to collect data from various sources, from various tools, software that an agency is using. And then make sense out of this data, uh, manipulated in such a way that then the agency leadership has a clear idea of what's going on, what goes wrong, what goes well, giving actionable, meaningful information based on this raw data that you have spread across many different avenues. Places. It may sound pretty simple on the surface, but there are so many different technical issues and also like product rated issues, defining all those metrics, defining what input data is going to be needed for this metrics. And then defining also the ranges or way to interpret those metrics. This is like a huge deal, and it's really hard, challenging, also rewarding. What do you think about the, those metrics and how they can serve the agency?

Arlen: 22:10

Yeah, yeah. I like the way you're talking through that in the sense that there are many angles of complexity involved or complication involved in turning data. into something useful. Most agencies have a lot of data, and they also probably have a bunch of spreadsheets working to make sense of that data. But it can take a lot of manual effort from people who are already spread thin. And just because you're able to track a metric in some way, pulling in those data sources into a spreadsheet, for example, It doesn't mean that shows you, one, what to do about that. How do we know whether it's healthy or not? How do we move that number, though? How do we take action to improve it? For example, if delivery margin is going in the wrong direction, of course we want to improve that. You probably always want to improve delivery margin. But, the data doesn't always easily point you to the best actions to take. And then even another layer on top of that, for agency leadership, there's always way more to do than they could possibly do. And so how do you even prioritize? Which problems to focus on and solve. And so that's another layer of the space that we are working on and excited to help in is turning those insights into clear priorities that can then be actioned to get traction.

Piotr: 23:33

If you take a, an athlete, okay, professional athletes into concentration, the athlete can go to a specialist and they may do some examination to do some tasks. and give you some answer about what is the performance, what issues may you have with your muscle or your bones, then you have to go with another one. And they also have to give you some other advice and they may ask the athlete to do some really in depth examination, but there's still need of someone that is able to get all those tests or those examinations. And then make sense out of that and then tell exactly, you know, we are a great basketball player. You want to jump higher or be more precise in your shots, then you should practice and do this thing. And you should also eat this thing and you should restrain from that. Be very specific because then a soccer player may come and they may get a totally different recommendations out of the same input data. So that's why, that's why I see our service and our business, we not only give the product of here's all the examinations, here are all the tasks that you have to go through. It's also not just a few specialists that give you very specific advice. It's like, we also have the service. where we can get this all together and give you a very specific and tailored bespoke recommendation for the next steps. And it's not just one point in time. And one recommendation is taking you through and guiding you. Over time, so that you become even more successful as an athlete, in our case, as an agency owner, as an agency in general, as a business, what do you think about this?

Arlen: 25:25

Yeah, no, no, that's a great metaphor. And there's a couple of pieces there that you highlighted. One being that great advice is good. There may be general advice, like people as a rule, if you eat this way, or as an athlete, if you eat this way, it's good. But the way different people. Interact with that advice is going to be very different, the kind of results that they get. So we aren't here to solve a problem for all agencies at once. And this is part of why we're not building software that we then bring to market, and then see how the market perceives that, right? We're going to be working with one agency at a time, while we're also building software that could work at scale, potentially. But we're letting those things feed off of each other, because I think that customization Of the advice, not just to that type of agency or even that specific agency, but to the moment they're in the holistic look at their overall situation and then helping them to decide what is most important now, where are you going to get the most traction? And maybe that leads well into. our desired future state. We're helping agencies move toward their desired future state. What is our desired future state and the value we want to add in the next couple of years? Um, maybe recap your perspective on on that because it fits right in with what you were just describing.

Piotr: 26:47

So from my area of responsibility is to provide a very stable, um, Reliable software tool that would allow agency leadership team have insight into what's going on in their business that will be easy to use, that will provide the accurate results. That will be aesthetically pleasing as well. Maybe not daily, but regularly used software. Agency leadership will not be imagined living without after using it for a while. So that's how I see it.

Arlen: 27:28

I often think of things in pretty bespoke ways, like working with one agency at a time, although I really value the idea of scale. And so I liked recently when you were reminding me about how If we are, for example, assessing an agency and helping them to see where the biggest opportunities are, wouldn't it be great if all they needed to do was to provide the API keys, right, to their major tools, and those get plugged in, and within just minutes, they are already getting some valuable insights. And that's maybe the very practical representation of what you're describing, or a piece of that, would be step one. And I'd love to see over The next season for us, whether it's a year, 18 months, whatever that looks like, getting to the place where for some of the major tools on the market in the CRM space and the PSA space, we can come to an agency, they can plug in their API keys, and they can almost immediately begin getting some insight. It may not be ready. It may not be ready. everything they need, right? Like it's going to need customization. That's going to need some tailoring, how we work with that data, et cetera. But being able to get that insight from just a few minutes of investment, begin to get that insight, I think is something I'm really excited about getting to. And a practical representation of that to me is helping Agencies capture and create a 1, 000, 000 in operating profit collectively, like some of the early customers we work with over the next year, so helping them in a very tangible way profit is leverage, and it helps people be healthier. It helps them make better long term decisions. So that's often a lens that I'm thinking about is how do we Help people make the changes, make the decisions that will unlock increases in that profit and increases in the health of the agency. So thinking about where we are right now, what's happening behind the scenes now? What are you up to? What are you thinking about and working on right now?

Piotr: 29:32

Speaking of those various tools and software, that's, that's actually the, the thing that I've been working on in the past couple of cycles. So integrating our first set of, uh, external tools with the app that we already have in place. So we started off with the, let's say proof of concept for the application and it worked pretty well. And allow us to model what we want to have and how it would. And now the time has come to start getting data from the outside. And so I'm working on integrating it with harvest and with forecast. We chose those as the first external tools because they seem to be very widespread. Their API is clear. That's my first target along the way. I encounter. Many different challenges that I wouldn't think of earlier. It's about data normalization, cleaning up the data and making sure that every piece of information is kept in the correct place and it's interpreted in the right way. So, yeah, I would love to circle back and talk about this more in one of the future episodes, because there's. Just so many things that that we could talk about around that.

Arlen: 30:58

Yeah, it's quite a rabbit hole, right? As you get in there, a lot of these are not necessarily technical challenges, right? They're not necessarily hard to write code to address. But there's a lot of decisions from more of a business standpoint. How do we handle these situations? How do we optimize to give the best insight in light of a lot of different ways agencies can work? You even take something. As, as simple as discounts, write offs, and credits, right? Like, how do you handle that at the invoice level? There's a lot of decisions to be made. To create a good solution for people, and you've been supporting and collaborating with me on this directly, it's it's developing a new assessment that we can use for agencies right now. It's really focused around profits and how we can find the best paths into growing delivery profit. So the profit directly from work with clients, not not operating profit, although that's something we're also very interested in, And moving towards the first customers for that profit assessment and then leading into supporting some of those people in implementing the recommendations and getting the results that they're really after. So I'm super excited about that. In the coming weeks, we'll be getting into the weeds with some agencies and excited to see what we learn and the impact we can make for them with that.

Piotr: 32:20

I'm looking forward to seeing that as well.

Arlen: 32:22

Living in northern climates, I'm sitting here in a down sleeping bag. I keep my office pretty cold. I don't heat it very much. Something that I love to think about is what we're looking forward to. So with it warming up in the coming months, what are some things you're excited about?

Piotr: 32:38

I'm always looking forward the most to, for travels and going with my family. I think we'll go somewhere for the, in May. In Poland, we have this. Longer weekend at the beginning of May, where we can kids are off from school. So we can go somewhere and spend a few days outside of the city. And then I'm obviously thinking the most about the summer holiday. And three years ago, we, we did a road trip to Greece, uh, to the Corfu Island, uh, which is not an easy trip to,

Arlen: 33:13

Not an easy road trip. Yeah.

Piotr: 33:15

Yeah. From Poland, especially because you have to travel quite far. And but then we were just the family of five of six and our dog. So it was a bit easier. And since December, we have invited one more member to our family. Yes. So. Now with five kids and a dog, it's gonna be a challenge, but we are still thinking about doing a trip again like that. I find those It's kind of a, it's kind of travels and trips, uh, say highlights. And usually they're very challenging and you can feel at some point you regret.

Arlen: 33:50

Why am I doing this? Yeah.

Piotr: 33:52

Yeah. But when you look back at the situations, you then realize that this was actually worth doing and. It, it was, you know, because of that, this is the highlight. I can also relate to, you know, during the business and creating this app and doing all of those things as also, you know, this is a challenge and you can see so many issues with that here and there. But this is meaningful, and I will remember that as a really important thing that I did in my life. So yeah, we are looking forward to doing this road trip. Not sure if we'll do that. If yes, then we'll stay there a bit longer, probably for more than two weeks, two or three weeks. Probably doing some work. We have our favorite place on the Corfu Island, so we'll likely try to go there. We'll see how it goes. Sounds amazing.

Arlen: 34:39

And I think you're right. Life is in the journey. And so even if you opt to travel in ways that are maybe a little more challenging, the adventure can be so much of what makes it meaningful to your family. Right. And as I'm here, piles of snow outside of my house, uh, around January, I start really thinking about, and I like winter. I live in, chose to live in a climate with four or five months of winter, but It's backpacking and getting out with the kids, and you talk about the adventure, challenge of travel. My, my kids often don't like the hike in to whatever alpine lake or cool place we're going. There can be a lot of complaining or, yeah, a lot of pushback. And this is not an optional activity in our family, going backpacking. It's something we do, but always. When we're hiking out, they tell me, I'm so glad we did this. This was amazing. We had a good time and we always really enjoy it. So I've got nine, nine backpacking trips on the plan for this year. I'm quite sure we will not do them all right. Like it, I'll be happy if we get six or five or six in, but, but aim high. And then the results are good. So I was just talking with my son last night about, and he's the most resistant to it and he sounds really excited this year about what we're doing and what's coming up and so I'm looking forward to getting outside, getting into the mountains a little further. And in enjoying that peace and quiet. I love the work I do and I love to have a bit of an escape from that as well. So, super. This has been great. Really enjoyed this opportunity to chat a bit about what we're up to and. We will have future episodes like this, where we dive into maybe specific topics related to the behind the scenes work that we're doing on Agency Insight, that the application we're building, as well as in our practice working directly with clients, things that we're learning and impact that we're able to unlock there. Thanks for joining me today.

Piotr: 36:33

Thank you for having me.

Arlen: 36:36

Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Agency Health Podcast. You'll find key takeaways and links for this episode in the show notes. If you found this episode valuable, consider subscribing and sharing. Take care, and be well.