What happens when your agency hits a rough patch and complacency sets it? How do you even know if your team is complacent and how they approach all to grow the business?It’s a situation many leaders dread, yet overcoming complacency is a potential turning point for innovation and growth.
In this recap of a Social Pulse Weekly: Agency Edition episode, we are digging into a transformative story where tough times spurred dramatic changes and led to a culture of innovation.
[Listen to the full episode of the Social Pulse: Agency Edition below, or read on for the transcript highlights. And get started with Agorapulse today by signing up for a free trial.]
Our guest is Grant McKinstrie, CEO of Digital Position. At the beginning of the year, his agency faced a significant challenge that revealed a level of complacency he couldn’t ignore.
Instead of succumbing to the pressure, Grant and his team rallied together to revamp their processes and reignite their innovation spark. In just a few transformative months, they achieved more than they had in the previous half-year. Grant is here to share how they turned obstacles into opportunities for growth and pushed their agency to new heights.
Bouncing Back from a Rough Patch: Grant’s Story
Mike Allton, podcast host: Let’s start by just sharing a little bit more about that rough patch that your agency hit.
What were those signs of complacency that you saw?
Grant McKinstrie: I certainly want to preface that I am not a perfect guy myself.
I hit my own sense of complacency. I don’t want it to ever seem like this was a team thing and not my own issue. I mean, certainly being the CEO, I need to take all the pitfalls and all the hits. If things aren’t going well, that is my fault. If things are going well, it’s everybody else’s praise that gets received at the end of the day.
But I think what happened was … I think a lot of agencies experienced this—a lot of companies that they work with clients, whatever it might be—people are looking over their budgets. They’re looking to see where can we cut costs. Marketing tends to be one of them that very frequently gets hit.
This year, we saw a pretty heavy hit of that. There was one client that we did expect to lose, which was a good chunk of our business. And when I say good chunk, it was probably maybe 5 to 10 percent of our business—which again is a good chunk—but it was one of those things where we had some of these expectations, but we weren’t necessarily acting on it.
This is something where me internally being prepared for it for a couple of months of understanding, yeah, this happens every single year in the back of my mind. I was mentally prepared for it but wasn’t actually acting or doing anything for it. Just [in] hindsight, really stupid. Anybody listening to this is probably going to think the same thing, but it’s just one of those things where it wasn’t anything that I had personally gone through at that point (given I am still a very new CEO). I’ve been running CEO within this company for about a year now, but there’s a lot that I need to learn still.
There was just a lot that—although I became understanding of the situation that was going to happen to it—I wasn’t doing nearly enough to be able to help inform the team that this is what’s going to happen: “This is how it’s going to impact us. What are we going to be able to do to fix it?”
In the back of my mind, I was like, “Things will work out, and we’re continuing to do things that have gotten us successful or have made us successful for the past decade that we’ve been in business.” But that’s just not how it works all the time. You need to continue to innovate.
I did hit this sense of complacency, and everybody else was somewhat in a similar space. We recognized that we had processes and our Monday board that hadn’t been touched for a year prior. We had multiple things that we were trying to build up: the creative aspect of our business, Amazon, and our business, and we just hadn’t seen movement in it for months or at least actionable movement in months.
And it was something that we would constantly come into meetings about it. We would talk about it. We would have all these good ideas, but when it came to the execution, we just weren’t doing anything.
Once everything came to fruition at this key point where we started to lose a ton of clients and we started to hit this panic.
Even though, again, it was something we expected, it still didn’t mitigate how much it hurt at the moment.
What happened immediately when the first thing was required is we fortunately already had planned a mid-year summit for the team where every year annually, we’ll all fly to one location. (We’re a fully remote company. We’ll fly to a single location.) We’ll all meet up together, and we’ll talk about our previous year’s goals. “Did we achieve them? What are we doing currently right now to improve the business and what we’re going to do for the following year?” But a year is a really long time, and we recognize that we need to set up a mid-year summit.
Fortunately, we had a timeframe of that in February where we just went to step into that and put the pedal to the metal at that point. Before going into that, the original plan was to go through the financials of the business, and maybe do some team-building stuff, like do some nice things. And instead for the first time within my leadership over the course of the year, I felt like I needed to put my fist down. And it was a big learning experience for me as a leader.
I think that was something that instilled a spark within the team that we just had not seen in a long time.
And I think me having to personally change not necessarily change my leadership style but evolve my leadership in that moment of, guys, I simply just can’t stand here and be like this slow-and-steady-improvement-over-time type of guy when we have just hit a bottom, and we need to ramp things back up or else the end of the year is not going to look pretty for anybody.
[Check out earlier episodes of the Social Pulse: Agency Edition where each and every week we’re talking to marketing agencies like you going through many of the same struggles you’re going through and sharing their stories.
Subscribe to find in each episode, inspiration, motivation, and the perspiration that go into growing and scaling agencies like yours.]
Nobody’s going to be happy, and things would unfortunately have to change simply because of that.n Because if we’re absolutely tanking as a business, it’s tough to be able to keep everybody on board. As sad as that is to say, unfortunately, it’s just plain and simple in terms of how that has to work.
I needed to be able to step up. I needed to approach the team with the severity of the situation, what was going on, and what needed to happen because it was clear we had a ton of blow in the business.
We had so many projects that were in the pipeline that just weren’t getting touched or weren’t getting focused on. And we needed to cut about 70 percent of the tasks out of our business that do not matter and is not going to move the needle for us. This 30 percent is going to, and we are establishing clear criteria or clear ownership for each task.
Every single person has a clear duty and responsibility for each task and a due date for everything. And which sounds, again, very, very simple or very obvious in that sense. But it’s so easy for things to continue to build up, blow over time, and you just don’t recognize it because it happens so slowly over time.
The biggest thing was recognizing that going into our current tasks, blowing it all up, completely revamping our entire system of how we are looking to implement new tasks to be able to focus on, and then just spending an entire day of each department breaking out into individual sections, completely destroying their Monday.com boards. Uploading new tasks, assigning people within the team who are responsive for each of those things, signing those due dates, and then having a constant check in the system until those things got done to get things turned around because we got our creative process moving.
And I think for the culture that we have built within the team, the biggest thing is being able to establish with them. We are a team, we have to be able to enjoy the successes together—but we also have to be able to lock in together for the failures together at the same time because otherwise, it’s just a pipe dream.
It’s not all rainbows and unicorns, which is, I think, a phrase I used probably like two dozen times in my speech that day—but we have to understand that it just cannot always be going straight up.
There always is going to be this fluctuation. It’s just how we handle each of these things. Because the lows suck, but it makes those highs feel so much better. And if you’re able to embrace the lows, [you’ll] be able to lock in together as a team, it builds the team to be a lot stronger than they were before.
So that was pretty long winded for that entire story and everything that happened there. But I hope that gives at least a little bit more context on that.
Mike Allton: Well, thank you for sharing that. Thank you for being so transparent and honestly vulnerable.
One first thing I’ll tell you is that this show is all about talking to agency owners in the seat like you, agency owners and technicians are listening [and reading!]. They’re going through a lot of these same challenges I talked about at the very outset, the perspiration that they’re feeling, which means they’re feeling stressed, they’re feeling overwhelmed. They may not always admit it, but they are.
The second thing I’ll tell you is that while it may feel like a lot of this is “duh” material, it’s not because a lot of folks go through the same things—whether they’re an agency or other businesses, they’ll have seasonality to their businesses, and if they’ve been around for more than six months, they have that business history and they have that history of success going through those different seasons, and it’s super easy to simply assume we got through this before we’ll get through this again, if we’re slow in the winter. The last two years will be slow this coming winter and we’ll get through it just like we always did.
I definitely wouldn’t beat yourself up too much about coming into this year’s season because, yeah, it was a slow season. It was a season of churn for many businesses and agencies, but it was also worse than most of us have seen in a long time.
Initial Challenges
So what I’d love to do is: We’re going to unpack everything you just said because it’s a terrific story. And I don’t want to go into some of the details.
Let’s start by going back to that first initial moment, that “Oh sh*t” moment, if you will.
Can you share what your initial reaction was, and how you decided that innovation would be the key to overcoming some of these challenges that you were suddenly faced with?
Grant McKinstrie: I don’t think I’ve ever felt a pit in my stomach drop that hard, quite honestly. I’ve never necessarily just uncontrollably started crying in that moment. It was just one of those things where I was like, “Damn, I feel like I’m personally failing really hard.” I was brought into being the CEO of this company to scale it, to continue to make it better, because the previous CEO had started the company. He had been doing a lot of things within the business. He had his hands in so many different elements that just didn’t allow the company to be able to scale that it needed to be.
So, I came into this position a year ago to be able to make those changes to be able to allow us to scale. So for me to come in and within a year experience something like that, where now we are at the same numbers that we were in 2023 going into 2024 with no growth to show for, I couldn’t help but feel like an absolute failure for that piece.
But being on the other side of it at this point, I am incredibly grateful that it happened to a degree because how else am I going to be able to learn about something like that to be able to see how that can play out in the future to be able to avoid it from happening ever again?
And that’s not to say that it’s never going to happen again, but hopefully, to that degree, we’re going to be far more prepared moving forward for anything like that ever again.
In terms of how I reacted, it was a pretty rough week or two or probably even longer than that. I feel like time probably flew by slow, but just now thinking about it, it was a quick period of time—but it was a mental struggle, for sure, but also recognizing that, “Hey, I’m the leader of this company, I need to be able to pull myself together, and I need to be able to bring this to the team and be able to rely on everybody else, because certainly it’s not going to be a problem that I can fix myself.”
It is one of those opportunities where I very quickly understood that I know I have everybody’s back and the entire team has my back as well. And it was just a point where the company had to feel vulnerable. I had to be vulnerable, and we had to just approach it with just a sense of urgency that I don’t think we’ve ever had to push before in that type of context.
Can you walk us through the planning and the execution of that and kind of what happened next?
Grant McKinstrie: I walked into that summit, and I was like, “Hey guys, I know we had an agenda today that we were going to talk about all of these other things. We’re going to try and have a fun time with this, but we gotta lock it in the bucket, and I need everybody here to really understand the severity of this.” And I know I’m generally somebody who wants to be able to try and crack a joke or something like that to lighten the mood.
But I wanted to be very serious about this. “I understand we have a lot to be able to take care of, but I just want everybody to be fully dialed in for the next two to three hours right here. So that we can get on track or otherwise people aren’t going to be able to get what they want at the end of the year.”
And that’s all I want to be able to do is I know everybody has the goals that they have set in mind, things they want to accomplish, raises they want to be able to achieve bonuses, whatever it might be at the end of the year, and we need to take care of this now otherwise, that’s just not, but we, unfortunately, have our hands tied in that sense.
From that point, it set the tone. Go over the agenda of “we have way too much bloat going on. We have not been moving on these certain tasks. We need to be able to figure out how to continue to push our sales funnel.”
Then it was: breakouts within each department. Let’s remove all of this bloat. We have all of these tasks within our Monday boards. Everybody collectively, let’s rate each of these tasks. How important are they? If they’re not important, either move them to an old folder that just doesn’t need to be seen until maybe we’re in the best possible shape we could be. I can almost guarantee you we’ll figure out something better to be able to do than that. But it’s just continuing to grade each task that we have on this board. If it is not moving the needle for the business, can we see revenue improvements from it? Can we see process efficiencies from it that are in the long term, going to be able to have benefits for our clients? Does it directly benefit clients? If not, let’s just get it out there. We don’t need it. It’s not being valuable for us right now. And it’s just continuing to waste bandwidth and headspace by us having it exist to begin with.
And then the other thing was looking to push within the creative process that we’ve been trying to develop. We’ve struggled with this over the past year. It’s something where we landed that we are good at being paid media buyers, where we can strategically understand the data of what’s going on within an account, know how to be able to approach just about any situation from an analytical standpoint and be able to see progress and improvements for clients over time—something we’ve always been good at, but when it comes to how difficult or how much of a black box creative can be, we found ourselves struggling with trying to push it into this analytical side when there’s a lot of freedom and creativity that comes with creative that we just were having a tough time grasping on.
Mike Allton: I think the key takeaway there is the importance of having that kind of candid conversation of being upfront with your team and laying out all the stakes and say, “Look, this, this is the reality of where we’re at today,” and then let them get to work.
Mike Allton: Grant, you talked about bloat. You talked about all these tasks in Monday that maybe they didn’t need to be there at all or need to be prioritized differently.
Can you give an example of a specific task or process that in your mind underwent significant change and how that impacted the operations afterwards?
Grant McKinstrie: One thing that we have as one of our proprietary software is Digital Pulse, which funny enough is [close to] Social Pulse. Close to the same name, I guess, to a degree. But we have our own analytics tool that we use to pull in data for our clients.
And it was one thing where we kept adding on these features and features and features and features to this thing to where anytime we needed any development work to be done for it took weeks and weeks and weeks, and it just became more and more of a monster over time.
So we decided that it was taking up way too much bandwidth within the back end of our team and it needed to just be blown up entirely. So we almost scrapped the entire software to a degree and started completely over from scratch with Google Sheets of, “What do we need to be able to do to make this as simple as it possibly can be?
So one, it doesn’t take weeks to be able to see progress or features added to this platform?
And two, how can we just make this as simple as possible to just look in five to 10 seconds at a dashboard of data pieces for our PPC clients or SEO clients and understand what is the issue going on: if there are any, or to just give a quick insight to any sort of fractional CMO, CMO, COO, CEO, whoever we’re working with at a very high level and be able to get impactful information that they’re going to be able to understand what is going on within the business and what is going on within each individual channel.
So that it’s saving time from people and then also it’s focusing on the things that actually matter when it comes to reporting too, because it’s very easy to get lost in the weeds and over report on a ton of things that don’t necessarily matter, or we want to be able to say because it makes us look good or whatever it might be when realistically, it’s just additional bloat. It’s just like the key word for that entire summit was we have so much bloat everywhere and we need to be able to address it and it’s now something that we have completely implemented within so much of our practice I would say at this point where we have our Actual annual summit coming up in the next two weeks here. And we’re going to do the exact same thing because I think it’s a really good exercise to be able to do for a company of, yeah, everything that has been implemented as a task or something to get done over the course of the past six months or however long it is. Might have seemed really important at the time, but then when you come in and take a look at everything individually, piece by piece, and try to objectively look at it when it didn’t seem like it was a good idea in the moment and figure out what are actually the good ideas to move forward on is incredibly impactful.
And I feel like a lot of people would be really surprised and who knows? Maybe that’s something that could be a me problem where I just like to, I think there’s a lot of really good ideas out there initially and then we put out a lot of things to be able to work on. And then down the line, it seems like crap, but I would imagine a lot of people face a very similar thing where there is either paralysis by analysis, or there’s just this too much that keeps getting popped up and not enough or is it organization that’s being focused on in the time.
And I don’t want people to think that they can’t come up with ideas or bring things to the table of like, Hey, I think we should try something like this because that’s all incredibly valuable. But I think on a more consistent basis, being able to take a look at it and really dive into what value would this provide if we were actually to see this from start to finish more frequently is can save a lot of time.
So kind of digress from the initial question a little bit, but that data pulse thing for us was a really big pivot and it’s something that we’re still technically working on, but I think it was probably one of the biggest things that came out of that was we recognized a lot of time was being sucked away within that platform itself. And being able to save the team time, re-guide a lot of the metrics that we were looking to drive success out of was being re-imagined and just re-visualizing something that had been part of the company for about six years, probably just about that hadn’t seen a whole lot of development other than just constantly tacking on more and more features, which just added to the bloat and just made it become this massive, massive ball of an issue. And now we have consolidated it to this very, very small thing over the course of a couple of months.
Mike Allton: Well, I’d say you’re spot on when it comes to ideas. We had an entire episode with Matt Heinz of Heinz marketing, I’ll put a link to the show notes. And it was all about having a correct framework for the agency, Matt, like you is an idea guy. And what he recognizes he needed an integrator, something that the framework says you need to have in the organization. In his case, it’s a COO, someone who can listen to 10 of his ideas and say, none of them are garbage, or we cannot do that right now. Cause we’ve already set our Q3 plans, but here’s the one idea that I’m going to take to the team today or the two ideas or we’re going to put this on and do that filter for the team because I tell you when my CEO comes to me with an idea, He’s the CEO. It’s a challenge for me to say no. It’s a challenge for me to push back and not necessarily because it’s a bad idea or a good idea, but just because he’s in that leadership position.
I want to do well for him. I want to make it out of me. And so I want to take anything that he says and make it into reality. And the rest of your team probably feels similarly. So like I said, folks, if you haven’t listened to that episode with Matt, I’ll share it.
And I’m curious, Grant, for your next free annual summit, are you going to practice getting upset to open, open that up and have a prepared statement?
Grant McKinstrie: It’s funny. I’ve thought about doing it jokingly, like of just trying to be like flip a table. Like, I don’t know, get one of those like sugar glass things and just like shatter it. I don’t know. Like I’ve thought about that over the course of the past week. But I still think there needs to be a, like a lock-in or just like we need to dial it in the type of focus mentality, because how I really want to focus the summit this year, that’s been different from the previous year is breaking up into more like hour, hour and a half bite-sized pieces of like breakout sessions. Cause I can definitely understand that like two to three hours of sitting there and talking and just our brains are constantly engaged within that period of time is exhausting. So it’s continuing to make it more bite sized and manageable for the team so that when we are working and when we are coming together to figure out these ideas, breakout processes, whatever it might be, build out a better sales funnel it’s way more efficient and effective within that hour versus we lose a ton of steam within that last hour, hour and a half that just isn’t nearly as impactful as what it could have been otherwise.
Mike Allton: Yeah, no, that, that makes complete sense. I just have one more question for you, Grant.
What advice would you give to other agency leaders who might be facing some of these similar challenges and looking to drive some change, some innovation/push back against the complacency within their own organization?
Grant McKinstrie: It’s tough to say because there are so many different things that can lead to something like that.
But I think the biggest thing is always understanding that you have a team behind you and being able to lean into the trust that you’ve hopefully built with that team over time. So that when these times do happen, there is no reason that you shouldn’t be able to take that to them and be able to figure out a solution. It’s never a solo endeavor.
And again, I know earlier we talked about how it always seems like very simple and common sense advice, but at the moment, it’s always incredibly hard to recognize that and feel that way.
Being able to see through that and one, you just need to get on the same page with the rest of the team, if you haven’t been open and transparent about communication of how the business is doing. You probably lack some form of fulfillment or buy-in from the team. It makes it a lot harder to be able to get that type of work out of them. And that’s just to say that every single person in the company has a purpose and wants that fulfillment.
And if you don’t give any reason for them to feel that way, then it’s only going to lead to additional complacency or just kind of a check in, check out mentality, which there’s a time and place to do that. And there are people that come into the company that are phenomenal at what they do, but all they want to do is they want to work from eight to four and that’s perfectly fine. That’s great.
But there’s also still a sense of community that gets established within it that when these things do happen, relying on how you have built that over the course of the last year, two years, three years, however long it’s been is just so incredibly important to have so that not everybody feels like the world is crumbling beneath you.
They trust you, you trust them, and you can just put metal to the ground and just make it happen. That’s all that needs to happen. There’s no sense in being able to be like, “Yes, you need to be able to collect your emotions and make sure that ‘Hey, I can go to the team and not just like break down when the company is not doing well.'” We still need to be able to lead with conviction, lead with confidence, and make sure that we have a clear path and be able to establish and develop a clear path with the team so that we can get to the other side of it.
That is the difference between what makes a good and a great leader: being able to take those moments and understand how important they are when they do happen to be able to make them into positive moments that you can reflect back on later and be able to build a stronger sense of team and community within the company.
If you want to connect with Grant, or maybe you’ve got an agency that’s dealing with different clientele and you want to set up some cross referrals that you guys are serving each other’s niches, we’ll have all that in the show notes below, and that’s all we’ve got for today, friends, but thank you for reading this episode of the Social Pulse Podcast Agency Edition on Apple and leave us a review, we’d love to know what you think until next time.
