In this episode I’m delighted to have as my guest Spencer Gallagher who took time out of working on the second edition of his best selling book, Agencynomics, which he co-wrote with his partner Peter Hoole, to share his thoughts on agency leadership and client management.
Having built and sold his own agency in 2008, he now runs the UK’s leading growth consultancy for agency owners, Cact.us and is co-founder of the Cact.us Academy, a training portal for agency owners.
He also heads up the not for profit global community of agency owners, also called Agencynomics and co-hosts the vodcast Agencyphonics where he interviews owners and thought leaders about growing an agency business.
In this episode we cover everything from what he thinks is most important when leading an agency and how he approaches agency growth, to the biggest agency trends he’s seeing and how to stay up to date and relevant in this time of digital transformation.
We cover:
* Key habits of highly effective agency leaders
* What successful agency leaders are doing now to accelerate their agency’s growth
* What Spencer would do differently if he was starting an agency again
* Key trends in the agency landscape
* Why you need to keep learning to keep yourself relevant
* Why agencies need to start thinking beyond social media and websites to supporting clients with their digital transformation..
…and lots more nuggets you’ll want to hear if you’re an owner, leader or account manager.
Transcript:
Jenny: Welcome to the Creative Agency Account Manager Podcast with me, Jenny Plant, from Account Management Skills Training. I’m on a mission to help those in agency client service keep and grow the existing relationships, so their agency business can thrive.
Welcome to Episode Seven. I have a real treat for you today, particularly if you’re an agency owner. I’ve managed to grab an hour in Spencer Gallagher’s diary and Spencer is in the middle of rewriting his book Agencynomics, which he wrote with his partner, Peter Hall and in this chat, we discuss what makes a successful agency leader now and what successful agency leaders are doing differently to accelerate their growth. What he’d do differently today if he was starting out his agency, what trends he’s seeing in the agency landscape and why you need to keep learning to keep yourself relevant. He also shares loads of fantastic, really useful tips, particularly if you’re an agency owner or leader and also if you’re managing tribe relationships. So sit back, relax and I will introduce Spencer in more detail.
Spencer – for those in the agency world, you need no introduction whatsoever. But for those in the audience who may not have heard of you or met you, you run one of the leading well, the leading, UK agency growth consultancy, Cactus. You’re also co founder of Cactus Academy, which is online training for agency leaders. You’re also the author of the bestselling book Agencynomics, which is a phenomenal book for anyone growing an agency. And you also run the biggest global community for agency owners of the same name, Agencynomics. And you’re also the host of the vodcast agency Phonics. So I’m thrilled because I know you advise companies, you’re a non exec, you do a lot of speaking gigs so to get some time with you, I know you usually sit on this side of the fence, is an absolute delight for me. I’m absolutely thrilled. Just a short intro before I pass over to you to ask you to talk a bit about your history. We obviously met a couple of years ago and what struck me about you was first of all your energy, which is phenomenal. I just don’t know how you get everything done, but also how you essentially adopted me into the Cactus and Agencynomics family, which I will be forever grateful for. And you’ve also gone on to trust me with many of your clients. So I just feel so at home in the community. I think you obviously attract a really decent, lovely type of person and you’ve created this really supportive community which is really active, really involved. And you just seemed so generous with everybody that you meet. So I would love you to share your journey with us because I obviously haven’t mentioned the fact that you built a 20 billion turnover agency and sold it. So I would love you to share your journey with us.
Spencer: Thank you. That was a wonderful introduction. Thank you. When I hear it back, sometimes I’m also thinking, Wow, how do I find time to do all those things myself? Well I’m so busy, I had a complaint this week from someone, who said your PA, Abbie, who you know very well, has said it’s currently 58 days to get a meeting with you.
Jenny: I’m not surprised.
Spencer: And I was trying to make the point that I actually look after about £100 million worth of agencies with 1000 staff and I think people don’t always realise what I do in my day job. Agencynomics is obviously something that I do as a bit of a charity, sort of social enterprise ‘pay it forward’ my spare time. But yes, I mean a brief history of time. You know, I’m one of those kind of classic entrepreneur types, I think. I left school at 16. No qualifications Left home at 16. Didn’t have the best start in life. You know, worked in clothes shops, selling clothes and so life wasn’t that good for me in the beginning. It wasn’t like, you know, pure poverty. But put it this way, you know, I brought myself up and your life wasn’t simple and I had to be quite independent from a young age and I don’t know, like I just worked really hard at everything I did, and I got some lucky breaks and I ended up at the age of about 27 getting made redundant. I went through three jobs in a year, got made redundant twice and decided that in my spare time I’d been playing on this thing called the Internet since about 93. So to give you an idea, Tim Berners Lee came up with the Internet html and in 1991 so 2 years later I’m taught myself to write websites and after being made redundant from a purple shed in my mum’s back garden, I started to build websites. And I started to build at the time what I thought was a web development company. And then about three years later, somebody walked into the business and said I really love your agency and I was like, what’s an agency and then from that moment onwards, the business really, really grew quickly. So that’s kind of briefly how it started, obviously aside building websites when it was a joke to build websites. So if you told people you built websites in the year 2000, they’d laugh at you because it’s a bit like crypto currency or Bitcoin today. And so you know there was a tough times I think we called ourselves new media agencies back then and so you know, it’s a long story short. I won, I got a couple of big breaks. One of them was Tottenham Hotspur football club and I then became very big in sports and I ended up building websites for people like the NFL, worked with Jamie and Andy Murray before they were, you know, big time really, you know, Judy used to come down to the offices. So we did a lot in sport , sports was our niche. But we did end up working with other companies like with Cancer Research, a big client. Before we used iPhones and Samsung we used blackberries, a BlackBerry or crack brief as we used to call them. So, yeah, I was very fortunate. Grew it organically. No investments. Deloitte Tech Fast 50 Growing business and ended up in 2008 really the big ad agencies had missed out on Digital. If you remember back then, they would call the digital team in their agency the dark arts department. Or they had, like, a separate division with a different name that did digital. A lot of big companies had missed out. They hadn’t found a way to integrate digital into their advertising or marketing, so I sold the business very successfully. I was the only owner of the business and at 37 I kind of retired really, I sort of stopped working and my last pitch in an agency, I share this story sometimes with people, it was 63 hours with three hours sleep, and it was for a global business with Technicolor to do the re-brand and the global website development. And after kind of stopping work in 2010 I decided that I would never work or set foot in an agency ever again because I was just so burnt out. But the reality was after a year of sort of stopping working and having some time outs, a lot of my old friends, my old competitors, my frenemies, would ring me up and say, Hey, listen, there’s a new era needed for a non-exec that understands technology, not just that Mad Men era. There were a lot of non execs 10 years ago who were very much from the advertising and marketing traditional world, whereas I was very much from the New World because I’ve been there and done it on did it organically I think there’s a lot of connection there, so we started Cactus, and that was nine years ago now and it’s been an amazing journey. You know, we’ve worked with a 1000 agencies, written a book and it’s been a lot of hard work, but I’m really proud of everything we’ve achieved.
Jenny: You should be as well. It’s a phenomenal achievement. What drives you now? What drives you to continue?
Spencer: Well, I think it’s still the same thing. You know, I was a 16 year old who left school with no qualifications. Who left home at 16 and I felt a failure and so I’ve always been driven by the fear of proving that I’m not a failure. You know, I’ve always wanted to be successful. Even when I sold the business, actually, I sort of fell off the top of Maslow’s triangle and crashed down because I’d sold the one thing that made me successful. And I had nothing to show for it anymore necessarily. I had a nice house and car, lovely family and, you know, but I didn’t really have something that I had built and made, you know, I’d sold it. And so in a way, then that’s a rebuild that, so the driver with Cactus all along is I guess, you know, a lot of people say, you know, you could be one hit wonder. I guess you know a lot of people could say because you build one business and sell it doesn’t mean that you can do it again. Well, I think a couple of people said that to me. In fact, you just reminded me there was a statistic that said something like and this is true, like only 30% of people who build themselves a business go on to do it again. So I wanted to prove that I could do it again. And I think we’ve done that through Cactus, time and time again now through our clients and through the investments we’ve made.
Jenny: You know, I love that you shared, but that because I was just reflecting. And I’m sure a lot of people hearing that very open story and a really honest story wo;; identify with that because I think. Like, I didn’t go to university. I mean, maybe in those days it wasn’t so common, but that kind of drives me. And also I think you’ve got a shared love of personal development. You’re always reading, aren’t you? I mean, you interviewed Daniel Priestley..
Spencer: Yeah, I managed to get Daniel Priestly on my podcast.
Jenny: Amazing. So you’re always developing yourself and your skills.
Spencer: It’s funny because they were sort of two or three books along the journey that really helped me, shape who I am. And when I say them, you know you’ll laugh because they’re the books that you probably see time and time again people always promoting. And the first book actually was it wasn’t The Secret, but it was, I was discussing it this morning with someone, it was a book with a red cover, and it basically said ‘How to be successful in life’. This is a 16 year old me going. I’m earning £70 a week selling clothes in Foster’s, which is like Top Man in a small town in Surrey, my life’s not looking great, and I read this book and I find I left home with my mum at 15, my parents divorced. I moved to my dad’s house, and he had it in his, just as I left home at 16, he had it on the bookshelf, and it was something called ‘How to Be a Millionaire’ or How to Be Successful. One of those books and I read it and it said, close your eyes, sit somewhere comfortable. Imagine your life three years from now. Now I listen, I had nothing, right? I had no qualifications so at this point, I don’t have anything other than this book telling me how I’m gonna I don’t know, do something with my life. But I did it. I closed my eyes. I said, by the time I’m 20 I want to earn £20,000 a year, which, bearing in mind where I was, was quite an achievement. To give you an idea, I think I was earning about £4000 to £5000 a year, and that would probably be about the equivalent of about £10,000 today. So 20 would probably be about, what, £40,000 today. I want to have a company car and I want to own my own house. And three years from that day, I bought my first house. I was 19 years old. Interest rates were 15%. Not 1% like they are now 15%. I got a first time buyers discount. Some reason the visualisation worked. Now I don’t know whether it was the manifestation of the secret or it was just the neuroscience, the fact that you know you achieve things, human beings, where we draw our attention to we focus and we achieve things. Who knows what the answer is? I still don’t know. But what I do know is it worked. And so the first lesson I learned was about visualisation visualising your future, and even today, every day I read out a daily gratitude list where I’m grateful for the outcomes that are gonna happen to me. That was the first one. The second one was ‘How to win friends and influence people’. And that gave me an ability at the time to be able to talk to anybody. I think I kind of had that anyway, because I was in the bottom set for everything at school. So I hung around with rough kids. But then I was reasonably sporty enough to know the wealthy kids so I could kind of adapt up and down a little bit, that probably helps you in sales. But actually reading that book, you know how to win friends made me realise what’s the saying, you know, to be interesting, you have to be interested, and just all of those techniques. And then lastly, it was ‘Think and grow rich’, which really underpinned the first book and you know for those people it’s a book that was written in 1927, ‘Think and Grow Rich’ and the book was at the time it just really struck a chord with me in many, many ways. So they were the kind of the early bits of reading I did, and what I found was because a lot of learnings from those books really helped me I realised that a real education in life actually starts the day you leave school, not the day – you don’t stop school and stop learning. You have to almost go, you know, and in fact, even I remember 2-3 years ago when digital technology started moving much more into distributed crypto, AI, you know, I went out every morning, walked 10 miles between six and 10K and 10 miles listening to audio books and podcasts around, AI, machine learning, trying to make sure that I’m staying relevant and I’m learning new things. Yes, a journey of learning has been really the heart of everything I do.
Jenny: And do you think that’s the secret of success for an agency owner? Because I’m sure there’s agency owner is listening to this thinking I really would like to have whatever Spencer’s got to accelerate my agency’s growth. What do I need to be doing differently? So do you see, when you meet so many, that the ones that stand out for you, you can see that they’re going to be more successful. Are there any kind of traits?
Spencer: So the reality is, is that we’re complicated people, human beings and I think that I’m very fortunate in, like a couple of my superpowers are able to sort of cut through. So where some people overly procrastinate or suffer from imposter syndrome or have, you know, barriers from, psychological barriers from when they were younger and their stage fright, whatever it may well be. I’m someone who always sees cut through. So I don’t try and coach people, and I talk about it quite a lot. I’m more of a fitness instructor because I find that I don’t really have the skills to be able to retrain the way people work. What I do is I tend to show them the answer and then I give them the trust and confidence to just make and take that action, that decision. And then when they do it and it works, you know then they are like, OK this is great. So the danger is with that, of course, is that if you don’t coach someone, they never make the mistakes. They don’t go through the process themselves, don’t learn it forever. So my approach is more like the PT instructor. You know, I’m moving the weight stuff. I’m telling how many reps you gotta do – you need to do three more, you know. But the moment I go, you might just revert back to going and hitting the Haagen Daz ice cream and I think a lot of agencies who start working with me, actually go back to who they were before. Because, you know, success, you know, is doing the right thing day in, day out, and failure is doing the wrong thing day in, day out. And so I’m just course correcting. I call it course correction. I have a philosophy that I believe is, you know, a successful philosophy, and I try and get people to understand that and embrace that and drive them down that route. But my skill, I guess, is to deal with all the different complex personalities and try and also find them the right people. Because, for example, you’re a good example of this, because I find that it’s very hard for me to work, I’m good at working with, like, agency owners, but I’m not so good at working with team members, you know, because team members do need coaching. They need a different level of empathy than I have time to give them. Apparently I’ve got a high EQ, I’ve just had my EQ test done today. I’m very highly self aware which is great. I have empathy, but I’m probably too busy sometimes to sit down and coach over a long periods of time. In fact, one of my colleagues who works with other non execs, he says, I sit in board meetings with other non execs and they spend six months trying to coach someone to do a new thing, and you come in, you just tell him to do it, you know, I think that so it’s really good to bring you in to situations for me. Like I find it hard sometimes to bring out the best in client services because they need the empathy that to relate to someone who’s worked in their role before. I haven’t been an account manager, I had fantastic account manager client servicing in my teams. I made a lot of mistakes but in the end, I feel like I got a successful team through making lots of mistakes. But I think you know that’s where you’ve got to bring the right people in to do the job could be better than you. And I’m also good spotting that, you know, so does that answer the question?
Jenny: It does, fantastic answer. I wasn’t expecting it to be answered like that, but absolutely and I was gonna ask you another one. If you were going to start again, because I know a lot of agency leaders that are here at the moment listening will be thinking Well, okay, so if you were going to start again, what other things that you’d be doing differently. Like you’ve said, you made a mistake. I’m sure a lot of us doing, that’s how you learn sometimes. But you’re very good at short cutting their learnings for others. So what if the top three things that you would be doing differently if you start it again now?
Spencer: Well, the thing that is really obvious, and I think people sometimes because I’m slightly more extroverted than I am introverted so it’s easy for you to say these things. But, you know, Malcolm Gladwell says, you gotta be 10,000 hours to be an expert. I’ve done 20,000 hours now, you know, helping agencies grow and another 10 growing my own. And the one thing I’ve learned is that agencies do not exist without, before even clients come on boards and even when clients do come on board, if you don’t have leads coming into the business, you will not have clients. You will not have services, people, processes, profit, cash. You won’t have any of those things. And so the number one thing you need to understand is how are eads generated. It’s not about creating the best products in the world than trying to figure out how you sell it. It’s not, you know, you have to understand what is it the problem that you’re going to solve as a service business? That’s what we do. We solve problems. What’s the problem that we’re solving, and how am I going to create an abundance of people wanting to work with me to do that? So the first thing is, is for me all about that. Mow to create that in today’s market, so if I started tomorrow and I have this thing, there’s a lot of people say I don’t know who the person is who maybe coins it, but there was a think it might be someone like Jim Rome or Tony Robbins they said, You know, if all the wealthy people in the world lost all their money tomorrow, they’d all have it back in five years. I really firmly believe that. I’m not someone who is obsessed about money at all. It is not thing for me, but the point is you see how to make life easier for yourselves. You know often as entrepreneurs and you see where the optical national agencies. But in today’s world, what would I do in simple terms? I’ve been a massive fan of Daniel Priestley, and I would first of all say you read his book ‘Key person of influence’ in a world full of people on social media, establish your expertise, work on your personal brands, your personal brand identity. You did it before I did. I came across you when I was just liking and sharing other people’s LinkedIn posts. And, you know, I would see you there talking about client services online, in video format. It was clear that you were an authority. And I think when I met you at the time, there was no other, I knew other people who did what you did, but you seem the biggest authority because you spoke about it the most. So I’d read ‘Key Person of Influence’. I’d work on my personal branding and my point of view and become an expert on what it is I’m looking to sell. And then the second thing, I would just get some LinkedIn training and learn how to use it properly. Because if it was the top 40 charts right now for lead generation agencies, I think the fastest riser is LinkedIn. I’m very fortunate, because I get to look at lots of pipelines every month, so I see where all the lead sources are. Since Covid started LinkedIn has been one of the fastest growing areas for new business its now appearing regularly on, whereas generally actually Twitter , Instagram they don’t often appear on, they do, but not very often appear as lead sources in agencies. So if I started again tomorrow I’d work on my personal brand, work on learning how to talk about the process, to share what I’m doing, to demonstrate my expertise. And I would start to build a really good network of connections because the number one way – I’ve done around two surveys this year, Jenny, one was the UK Lead Generation survey, and one was the Global lead generation survey. And if you take out the number two, number three way for agencies to get business is always existing clients referring other clients or existing clients leaving. But if you remove those because they’re already clients, the number one way is through networking, speaking ,thought leadership and so those three areas you need to build your connections, you need to set yourself some numbers. I mean, I used to have this thing, at Blue Halo where I’d meet 50 new people each month. And, I think today it doesn’t have to be new people, but meaningful conversations on a regular basis will build your pipeline and if you build your authority then those two things come together. So that’s what I would do in a nutshell.
Jenny: It’s such good advice and funnily enough I’ve seen quite a few posts from agency owners saying I followed what Spencer’s telling me and this month I’m doing my 50 phone calls and it gets results. Why do you think people resist it? Is it difficult? And why do you think agency owners don’t do it?
Spencer: You know I mean, it’s funny because Agencynomics isn’t my first community that I set up. In the early days of Cactus, I had a lot of people ringing me up, whose struggling in their businesses. Owners and I set up an early stage community, and I used to these talks in there. I used to share the philosophy that, you know, if you make 50 new connections a month and you understand what they do, then you share what you do then you’re able to help them in some ways, to build some reciprocity and not unauthentically but genuinely you know, the more you help, the more business will come back. And I knew that because actually, when I analysed my own pipelines, there was one guy spent a million pounds with me over 10 years because I helped fix his email in 1999 when he was made redundant. And so you help people, connect to people and keep in touch. And so I tell people this. And I remember going to a dinner in Manchester about two years ago, and I hosted an agency dinner there. And someone say yeah, you’re always banging on about this meet 35 people a month, and that’s just impossible. Now ir wasn’t 50. It was 35. And I said, you know, it’s Thursday. I’m in Manchester. Every day of the week, I’m in a board meeting from 10. 30 till five o’clock. So that means I’ve only had from 8. 30 to 10. 30 and maybe the evening. I just wanna let you know that you guys are my, I think it was the 70th people that I’ve met that week because I did a speaking event the night before, in fact you were there that week by the way. The MAA speaking event was about 35-40 people. There was quite there was a couple years ago. I’d worked out I’d met 70 people in four days, and you know the reality is there are 22 working days in the month, 21- 22 working days. If you talk to two people a day, you know that’s 44 people a month. If you can’t find, you know, an hour a day to have two conversations for half an hour over Zoom, you know, with people that you used to work with you, used to go to school with, ex colleagues, ex customers. Well, if you really want to be successful, then that’s what you need. And by the way, everyone has a number. So although mine was 50, because if you have 50 conversations serendipitously, you will probably find two or three opportunities. You don’t find 50, you find 1 to 3 and of those three, maybe one or two will convert. But that for me was worth about £200,000 a month when I was doing your business. There were people I know they do a hundred, and they bring in maybe 40 a month. That’s not a problem, but you’ve got to know your number because everyone will have a number based on the size, the stage they’re at, who they are, how they help people, etc, etc.
Jenny: I notice this might sound like a silly question, but are you finding that generally, particularly younger people prefer not to speak face to face or on the phone?
Spencer: Um, is it a younger person thing? I don’t know. I’ve come across some people of all ages who do and don’t do it. Is it a younger thing? Possibly. I mean, I don’t know. I’m not sure that I’m qualified enough or done the research to identify whether or not. The way people work has definitely changed, but I would say, you know, I know some fantastic super connectors who are under the age of 30 who do do these things. So maybe not.
Jenny: I suppose the reason I’m asking is in my work with account managers who always tend to be a lot, obviously a lot younger than me, I often say, well, how about picking up the phone or just call them. I emailed and I said XY and Z and I got an email back and they tell me this whole story of what’s happened over email and I said, well, how about just calling them or leaving a voice message or, you know, on LinkedIn and I suppose that was the reason for my question, really? And I was just wondering, is this a trend?
Spencer: I mean, I for me I think that’s yes I think there probably is an overarching trend as communication has changed, and people can use, you know, WhatsApp or text or Snap or whatever to communicate that they don’t need to ring up, pick up the phone. Interestingly enough, my son is 15. He talks into his phone, so they use Snapchat and they just send each other voice messages all the time. It’s easier than typing. They commentate through games. It’s like doing a phone call so maybe going full circle. But, you know, if I’m honest about it even 20 years ago, maybe let’s say 10 to 15 years ago with my client service team, you know, I probably used to be nagging them to pick the phone up more because as soon as email came out, it was very easy to hide behind it. But I do think there’s a lost art of communication. I think there is a lost art of picking the phone up, and I mean, I think through Covid, what was very exciting was all of a sudden a lot of marketing managers and clients who are quite hard to get hold of suddenly had a bit more time because they weren’t commuting. And actually, I think a lot of people who hate networking as an example found it a lot easier to just Zoom call to speak to someone, then having to go into a building full of men and women in suits or whatever. You know, I mean that horrible feeling of and they could just do it in this kind of format. So I think it’s, you know, it could well be a problem. And I think if you are an account manager, listening to this or account director and you, you know, be different. Be the 1% be the ones that pick the phone up, because that’s how you’re going to get cut through. If you want to be successful, you’ve got to do the marginal gain things you’ve got to do the 1% yeah, so you just got find a way to overcome the fear because actually, like all things, it scary the first time. But once you’ve done it. You know, it’s like speaking. If I meet, so many people are scared of public speaking. But, you know, the reality is is that you know, you start off with a couple of people on your team and say can I test doing a talk with you two? Then you pick five and six and you know, one day you’ll accidentally walk out like I did and there’s 200 people and you know you can’t even breathe, but you do it and then you realise, OK, I could do 200 now and it just gets easier as it goes up. We have to start somewhere.
Jenny: I’m so glad coming from you as well that advice was so golden for the creative agency account managers listening. Do you have any other advice that from what you’ve seen teams doing exceptionally well with their clients or making mistakes?
Spencer: I mean, I don’t know whether we did talk about this much detail, but there’s been a lot of, I think in the last eight weeks in particular where are we now we sort of October 2020 and certainly that middle of August, Campaign magazine started to do this kind of it’s the end of the account director and the end of account manager. No one really sees them any more as relevant. They’re not needed. And I just don’t believe that. I think that the problem is because of technology now being at the heart of all marketing and advertising and agency businesses, whether your PR or whatever, the technology is moving so fast. Business growth has become exponential too, in fact, the first time in history, ever, where technology has outstripped business requirements in the past technology could never keep up with business and now it’s the other way around. So the point is, is an account director you have to be commercially aware about your client’s business? But you’ve also got to understand that their business is changing rapidly because of technology. So the problem is is that you have to invest. So my advice would be, it doesn’t matter how much time your company give you to do research for learning and development. You’ve got to make your own time in the future world, I get up early every morning and walk before your day starts, or get in a car or whatever do now, get on a scooter but you’re gonna listen and learn about your client’s businesses and understand, you know, where things are changing. You’ve got to be relevant or you just become irrelevant. You become commoditised so my advice to anyone listening is, you know, there’s a famous meme going around with Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, if you’re not spending five hours a week learning new things, you’re not gonna be relevant. I genuinely believe that. I think, in fact, I would predict that during 2008 with the last recession hit, 2009, a huge volume of client service people got made redundant from agencies because they didn’t understand digital. And what happened in 2008/9/10 all they knew about was print and traditional advertising channels. Now they all got made redundant, they all came back two years later as social media experts. That’s kind of the joke of the time. They went away, realised they’d missed it all, learned about such a media, came back again again and got re trained, but they had to use a redundancy period to do that. The reason why I’ve already had five or six very senior client service directors I know been made redundant. And that’s because they know the world of websites and social media. But they don’t know the next world of digital transformation of, you know, machine learning, they don’t understand the next wave where technology is impacting on businesses. So my advice would be come up with your own learning and development plan to keep yourself relevant, to find your expertise, to understand your client’s business. And don’t be a victim to your company not giving you time to learn. It’s not about them. It’s about you, about your future, your career, you know, you will become more valuable to that company, to the clients, to other organisations. So don’t look at it is that you know my company aren’t paying me to get trained out of work out of hours. Don’t worry about it. Just do it. You know, I’m sure you probably did that when you were working back in the day.
Jenny: I always feel like I’m behind, so I could never absorb enough information. Honestly, there’s not enough hours in the day, so I do have that drive to want to know more. And, I have noticed that some people do have that drive and others don’t. But I think that’s such a good point, like invest in yourself because it’s about your career. It’s not necessarily just about the agency you’re working with, all the clients you’re working with.
Spencer: If you work harder on yourself than you do in your job, you’ll always be more successful in life. That was said by Jim Rohn and I mean, just to add, once I I sold my business. I went back and I got told, because I was a little bit anti Tony Robbins, because he’s always very positive and I’m very positive. But someone told me a good friend of mine about Jim Rohn, who was Tony Robbins mentor. I listened to a CD by him. A CD. I’ve got loads of them. I still can’t play them anymore. But you know his philosophy back then, you know, he said things like, you know, skip a meal. But don’t skip reading for an hour every day. I mean, that advice is timeless. You know, people say I don’t have time then just skip a meal and read, right?
Jenny: Absolutely.
Spencer: You know, it’s quite interesting. So I think I think the advice hasn’t really changed. If you want to become more valuable in society, you need to basically invest some time in developing yourself.
Jenny: Do you have any preferred sources of information that you go to like your go-to places to keep on top of things?
Spencer: Do you know, when I had the agency is very different to where I am now. When I had the agency, I was you know, the term ‘Maven’, I would look for a Maven so I would look for people who I read Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Tipping Point’. And in that book he talked about how things go viral, and there’s a Maven at the beginning, someone who kind of knows about the future or is an evangelist for a certain trend. And then you get connectors and sales people down there who spread the word. But I used to follow certain Mavens around certain areas. So who are the people that are talking about what’s next. For example, I would probably, again I’m going to do a bit of a Marmite thing with everyone now. Half of me would watch Gary Vaynerchuk because he’s going to tell you about the next and future. Whether you love him or hate him, you still gonna watch him and listen. The other half of me would be watching Mr Mark Ritson because I want to know what is the now? What should I be doing strategically? Because the smart money is knowing where the now, next and future are. So I would bring the two of those together and go, I’m listening to you guys. And, you know what, I do listen to those guys now. So when I have my business, I was used to follow, because I was in sports marketing I would look out often stalk the bigger, more successful sports agencies. Bigger, more successful sports brands, individual thought leaders and futurists in those areas. And so I would always look to get some intuition around where things were going. So I’d probably look at, you know, you look at my clients. If I was people listening now, I’d look at my clients. I’d find the thought leaders in that space, I would follow them. I would probably look at the services we sell and I’d probably tune into who’s doing the best now, and who’s moving forwards. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist right to look at Agency World now, and I know Stephen Bartlett recently left Social Change. But like he’s an agency owner, his agency’s grown from 0 to 800 staff in four years. Well, there’s something going on there, and he just happens to be an agency owner who is an influencer. So his personal brand, his thought leadership and the same with Vaynerchuk, Vayner Media, they’ve grown really quickly over a very short period of time because of the way that they’ve acted in terms of their personal brand. So yes, I would just tune into the experts it’s quite hard because there’s so much information out there now. But certainly there’s a lot of very good podcasts, I think McKinsey do a really good podcast talking about future of industry. So find things that really focus on now, next, the future of where you’re focusing from a services and from a sector perspective, that’s what my advice would be.
Jenny: Really amazing, brilliant advice. I usually say to people also look at all of the management consultancy websites because they have the resources and the power, the money behind them to do these studies, and you’ve only gotta be ahead of the curve a little bit. Do a few readings of you know, some of the reports coming out around, just as you say the client’s industry, your sector, to be one step ahead. So that’s brilliant advice. What else are you seeing trends-wise like, particularly, there’s two questions really. One, who aree the agencies or what are they doing differently that are putting them at the sort of cutting edge, maybe apart from building their personal brands? Is there anything else that they’re doing differently?
Spencer: I think the big shift is probably organisational transformation in agencies, I think Covid has been an accelerator in many ways for obviously the way the flexible first approach to working this what we call agile distributed model where maybe agencies now are able to attract a more diverse talent pool from a wider base. Because you don’t have to worry about, you know everyone hopefully work to a certain degree via video tools. I think we’ll get a little bit worn down within, probably craving a little bit more social face to face interaction. Now I’m saying that now I have been really quite happy, even I am feeling this week a little bit like I could just do it going out with a group of people, more than 30 and having a good time out. So I think the organisation transformation. So what I mean by that is I think the big shift is, is seeing less hierarchies of businesses. I’m seeing more flat, meritocratic structures, more grown up approaches inside businesses, you know, less bosses and management and reporting lines and more people being trusted to do their job. I’m seeing people being more open and transparent around the numbers, the communication, you know, there’s more experimentation in agencies more willing to test and try new things. And I think I’m seeing sort of a bit of a movement I think around the organisational structure piece. I think that’s the first thing, by the way there’s nothing new to this. I mean, when we wrote our book, you know, which came out two years ago and, you know, probably wrote the section three or four years ago, there’s a good few global agencies where they have this hybrid model of a core team and maybe a freelancer extended team. So I’m seeing some definite and trends around that, and I’ve seen some trends around, I won’t namecheck people here, but one client of mine in particular who you know, was in a pitch against two traditional agencies. And this is an agency that only has one employee, which is the managing director, the whole team is consultants, experts in this particular field, and they got chosen as the agency of choice for a FTSE 100 company because they preferred the model of saying, look, you only bring in the talent when we need it. You bring in higher quality talent rather than, but you see 10 years ago I lost, I remember I was talking to a big a FTSE 250 organisation who crucified me because I had a contractor in and they saw on LinkedIn that they weren’t working for me. So it’s again, so there’s another trend. I think the clients are maturing. The clients are going to be working more remotely. I think that means a better distribution of wealth around the UK. I think we’ll start to see people who are choosing agencies near where they live rather than nearer the central London office. So it’s definitely something. I mean, when people say about people giving up offices, I still say it’s fairly split. I think around half of people have considered giving up the office and another half are like no, we still need somewhere to meet and still need somewhere to forge our culture of people. So what other the trends am I seeing at the moment?
Jenny: Do you think that the people being made redundant, because obviously we’re heading towards the end of the furlough period for those in agencies that are gonna, unfortunately be made redundant. Do you see a trend for them setting themselves up as consultants or freelancers?
Spencer: Yeah. I mean the problem, the problem we’ve got in the economy right now, you have this thing called IR35 which is very annoying. Which means that basically, if you’re self employed, you can’t work for just one person without the company having to pay your taxes. And so as a self employed contractor yeah, you’ve gotta have multiple employers and, you know, they were gonna put the change the law earlier this year they didn’t do it. And so it needs modernising definitely to protect people from being exploited, you know, it is not a bad thing why it’s being delayed and taking time. So yes, I think inevitably, when there’s a lot of redundancies people will like I did when I was made redundant. They use the time to try and start to work for themselves and do things. I definitely think so. I’m going to make a bit of a blanket statement here, which is from what I’ve seen most of the people that have been made redundant because they haven’t moved with the times or there’s a carrot, or they genuinely were affected by travel by, because it’s only about four or five sectors that have really been hit. I wanna be really clear about this. 99% of sectors in the country are actually doing okay. They’re not booming, but some of them are booming like SAS. But there is only really a handful of sectors that are struggling. But some agencies just unluckily had everyone in that space. But apart from that, last night, there was a post. A good friend of mine works in user experience, and someone asked for some user experience people, and I put the name of a friend of mine who’s just been made redundant. And that post must have had, like, 60 names on it by the morning and it just goes to show how user experience has become more commoditised. And so it’s almost like you’ve got to keep going up this value chain. But what I would say is I have not seen many people who are working quite strongly in technology in a sector that hasn’t been hit by travel or high street retail that isn’t very secure in their jobs. So I would say people who are being made redundant do take a good long look at what you’re doing where your role is and do you need to progress it now to another area which is more future proofed.
Jenny: I think it’s a really, really good of advice. I’m just conscious of your time we’re coming up to the hour, can you believe it? It’s been so… I could talk to you all day, Spencer. Can you tell us what projects are you working on right now? What’s exciting you?
Spencer: So I’ve got a couple of really big announcements coming up, we’re doing a couple of partnerships, which is really exciting for me. I think the main thing is we’re working on building our training library for agency owners, which I’m hoping to tap you up for some account client service training in there as well. So very much that’s been something I’m working on now for a couple of years. It’s been taken awhile because we’re so busy to try and get them, but we are getting there. So the training stuff’s really exciting for us. We’ve just launched the masterminds workshops, which has been almost the first time we’ve been able to offer people maybe a low cost access to us because obviously being non- execs, you end up being a premiums or day rate. But this is a way to make us more accessible by people with smaller budgets but still get access to our tool kits, which we’ve developed over the last nine years. I’m loving it and it’s just really building, we’re building a team around the country. We’ve just taken on someone for the Northwest. I think we were travelling in the early days everywhere and now we’re realising that actually there are better people in the regions that could do these things for us. So that’s been exciting. And the communities, you mentioned the beginning, you know, we’re on our way to 800 members now. Very, very close. And the engagement? The statistics have been just honestly, so good. I mean, the engagement rates are so high. I think we score excellent in every single rating in the analytics on the platform, which is really nice. And as you said at the beginning, which I’m a little bit shocked too everyone so nice in there, and it’s weird because it’s free you’d think you’d get all in the kind of trouble makers in there? Totally weirdly, I think I may be Covid, maybe people have got more humility. Maybe through this period.
Jenny: It would really stand out if anyone wasn’t nice, wouldn’t it? It would be like, oh, no, that’s not what we do around here.
Spencer: When the person does something you’re like, alright..
Spencer: We’ve got a good few announcements coming up, new partnerships coming in, which I think will be really exciting as well. So you know, all good. All progressing really nicely. All good fun.
Jenny: So who would you like to hear from? Because obviously some people might be listening to this thinking, oh, I didn’t know he did consultancy. I didn’t know there was a community. What’s the best way of contacting you and who’d really benefit from contacting you the most?
Spencer: I think if you are an agency owner or a shareholder on Companies House, you know, with more than a team of three, because I’m trying to avoid having freelancers in the community because it will just become, because we do on our spare time, it’s all run for free. So if you’ve got more than 3 people, then please, or if your boss is that person or, you know, you’re whatever you know someone who owns an agency, please point them in direction of Agencynomics.com. And you know, if you’re that person, come in there and come along to an event and say hi to me. I think the best thing with me now these days is if you can is try and see where I’m talking, come along, listen and ask questions and then maybe we’ll try and talk through there. And yeah, I think you know I’m on LinkedIn. If you want to connect to me, please send me a personal message and you’ll need my email address, which is spg@cact.us But please send me a message because I only accept people now who kind of give me a bit of a back story in connecting. And year, I mean, you know that LinkedIn’s probably the best way to get hold of me. Just check out cactus.com website. There’s an enquiry form on there. If you know anyone that might want to work with us at some stage point them in that direction. That’s a shameless plug, I’m not normally that salesy normally.
Jenny: No, you’re not being salesy, Spencer. You’re probably one of the most generous and well networked people I know. Really, because you help everyone and to put your email address and the contact. I just think you’d be foolish not to if you’re out there on your own agency owner not to take part because there’s just so much benefit. You’re getting posts tagging you.
Spencer: I was saying to James earlier, the problem is, is that, as I said, the beginning at the moment, I’ve got a couple of big agencies who are selling it to their team, so different types of ways of selling businesses, and actually that takes a lot of time up. Sometimes I feel a bit like I want to make myself accessible but eventually it gets a bit hard so they’d be too offended if you want to have a video call with me and you gotta wait a couple of months, but it will come around quick enough so book it in. You know, that’s what I say.
Jenny: Absolutely. And just as I said, there’s not a day that goes by without someone saying thank you to you. So you are changing lives genuinely through your work, so you must be really, really proud of that. And I just want to say a huge thank you.
Spencer: They say don’t they your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room, and I think it probably applies to your personal brand too, so and it’s only really been last few months where I’ve started to hear people saying nicer things. It is quite embarrassing in a way. But it’s, you know, I’m grateful for the people that take time to say thank you. If I’ve helped with people I’ve helped in any way or any of the guys at Cactus and I would say, you know, it’s another good lesson, really. If anyone helps you on your journey out there, have a little think. And don’t be afraid to say thank you to them. You know, it’s just a really nice thing. And people would take a lot from it if you do, to make the time to thank people that helped you on your journey.
Jenny: Totally agree and very well deserved. Thank you so much for joining me, Spencer. I really, really appreciate it. Big thank you.
I really hope you enjoyed my chat with Spencer. I know that I got a lot of value from it and took down loads of notes, so I hope you’ve done the same. And if you’re interested in joining the Agencynomics community then come along to community.agencynomics.com. It’s a thriving community of agency owners. The only prerequisite is that you are an agency owner with three employees and it is a fantastic place to be. Lots of networking, lots of training, lots of advice and it’s completely free, so I look forward to seeing you there.
