Technology is advancing at breakneck speed. Client expectations are constantly shifting, and the very nature of marketing is seemingly changing with each passing quarter. For agency owners who have inherited or acquired established firms, those changes create a unique challenge.
How do you update your agency’s services, processes, and culture without destroying the foundation that made it successful in the first place?
Jordan Buning, the president of DDM Marketing and Communications, a full-service marketing agency in Grand Rapids, Michigan, has been tackling that question. Under his leadership, DDM has successfully navigated the transition from traditional marketing approaches to modern digital-first strategies while maintaining its core values and client relationships.
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Can you give us a brief overview of DDMs history and what the agency looked like when you first took the helm?
Jordan Buning: DDM started in 1990. It was the anti-agency of the era where a lot of the fees had been made on markups, on media, and that kind of a thing. It really wanted to be a value-driven organization. It was a convergence actually of two independent companies, one that was much more design-focused and other organization that was more marketing strategy and research.
What they quickly discovered is they continued to bump into each other and borrow from each other’s capabilities. They merged those two independent organizations into a single one in the mid-nineties and [had] this mindset that they were going to be as good as the last project that they did.
They were going to charge for time and performance as opposed to that media-based model. I was employee number six, and I learned from the ground up [at] an organization that was at the time a little bit of a unique player in the category. That I think has become more traditional in the year since then.
Mike Allton: Nice. And the DDM, what’s that stand for?
Jordan Buning: For whatever reason creative agencies are not a whole lot better than attorneys and CPAs and naming themselves after the founding partners.
So, while there were four partners in our company, Davison, Dee, McCarthy was three out of four of the original founders of the company. We got exhausted trying to spell it out and shorten ourselves down to DDM and worked back in the marketing and communications piece of it a little bit more as well.
What were the first signs that the agency needed to evolve?
Jordan Buning: I think a lot of organizations have seen plateaus in their growth. There are moments where you’re doing all the things that feel like doubles, triples, and home runs to what you’re doing. And then there are moments where you flatten out.
This organization had become very good at operationalizing a variety of different marketing services and automating information. We work a lot in healthcare and financial services, so finding some sweet spots to produce a lot of work in a very predictable and timely way.
However, the company was experiencing lower and lower margins. A lot of agencies are dealing with that kind of stuff. We were feeling a lot of diminishing cultural experiences. We were starting to see people that were a little less committed to DDM in the timeframes that we had been used to in the past. And we had leadership that was starting to anticipate exiting the final couple of leaders of the organization.
And so we knew we were hitting the nexus. And there was a debate that was happening amongst us as leaders that was: Do we just need more work? Or do we have a culture problem? And we were starting to wrestle with what was the problem? Was it the chicken or the egg?
And the answer was yes.
How did you bring your team along when you decided to make this transformation?
Jordan Buning: I think as far as the organization itself, it was a motivation around sustainability. And so as we had watched a number of different agencies around our marketplace that maybe had their shining moments and then had fizzled out. We were very motivated to create continuity and legacy of this organization.
And then I think we weren’t afraid to ask for help and engage people in the process.
One of the things that we did that’s belies our long-term history was we hired somebody who had more of an organizational psychology background who could help us start to, at least, ascertain what our current state was or our problem was.
We engaged a lot of the employees in a lot of one-on-one conversations and then learned to get that information distilled down into some buckets of information. And they had some of the same questions and concerns that we had. They were wondering what our viability was as the original owners would retire. They loved the simplicity of this organization, which was very flat. There was leadership and then everybody else loved some of the flexibility that we had. But they also wondered how they fit in. They wondered if it was sustainable. And we began to chip away at those things.
Frankly, we went through another phase after we learned some of that, where it’s like, “What do we do with this? How do we actually adapt this organization in a way that makes sense?” And we happen to be one of those companies that drank the Kool-Aid and eventually adopted EOS.
EOS has been valuable to us, and we certainly could talk plenty about that, but I would also say it was DDM being willing at that point to accept that it needed to evolve. I came from an era of this company where I was learning from all of the original founders. I was under their control day by day in terms of what they were doing and what opportunities that then afforded me were directly benefiting me.
So, it was a company that I grew up in a lot of ways, and it was easy to leverage it to my benefit. Being a bit of a curious person and less of a process person, it was fantastic. It wasn’t going to work for a different era, a different group of people who hadn’t been baked within the company for as many years as I had. It was very difficult to repeat.
I think it was a part of our challenge that we had to figure out is we needed to take some of the experiences that I had and make it much more accessible for somebody to ramp into DDM and have a shorter-term opportunity towards success than the many years of growth that I’ve been able to have.
So, that’s what we set out to do, and that’s what ultimately implementing EOS was important for us. We needed to operationalize a company that lacked a lot of clarity because we all did things the best way that we could. There wasn’t a DDM standard in a lot of things that we did.
And then the other was any disciplines. We really didn’t have much for the process. We had some, maybe we had written them down many years ago. But it wasn’t really modern and current. And so all these people that were coming into the organization as we would periodically have growth moments we’re having to find their way in the dark a little bit more.
And so those were shining the light on things that everybody could see were problems. And everybody could now participate in the process of problem-solving along with us. And so there was a lot more access to the company even though it felt very foreign. And I think the other piece that you’re mentioning is when you take people along, some people love it.
I was amazed at some of the team members, including our creative team, who actually loved us having a dashboard of performance information and they suddenly could see how their role tied to what the agency was doing. And then there were people that were solid performers who suddenly felt a very different experience in DDM being more defined and not everybody loved it.
And so there’s a transition era where some people choose other things. There are some times when DDM helps with its clarity, and encourages people to choose other things as well. And so we had to go through that evolution together. But I think we saw a lot of our long-term people who, over time, were certainly going to be uncomfortable and even doubtful a little bit of some of this framework as it stuck, as we stayed disciplined to it. I think some of those people built their confidence back up in this organization.
What was the timeframe here? How long did this whole process take?
Jordan Buning: One of the aspirations that I always had was how could we, as a company that was very good at various forms of marketing and communication, adopt some of the same business practices and sustainability that a lot of the clients that we were working for had in their organizations?
I love the people of DDM, and I love the integrity of the leadership. And I aspire to continue to grow the business acumen that just had a lot more headroom for us to go. I would say somewhere in between. I’ve learned some great lessons that it’s easier said than done so with all due respect to them.
But I also feel like we’ve learned a lot in the process as well. As far as the timeframe to implement this effort, it was probably about four years. We started this exercise in very late 2018. And we were about a year out from one of our primary leaders, our president, retiring. And I’m thankful for the fact that he was supportive of a process that he wasn’t gonna be a part of long term.
So we already went through one transition there.
That rolled us after about a year of trying to implement it smack dab into COVID-19 and the impact of a lot of difficult challenges that all agencies went through. He had just then retired, and so we spent about six months in probably some form of survival mode as we were working with our clients. The thing that we were working hard on was to make sure that we stayed supportive of our clients as they managed their own budget realities and that we weren’t just gonna abandon them.
So, we were as creative as we could be in terms of problem-solving. And then that springboarded us into a very significant growth era for us. And so thankful that EOS was there it also helped spotlight a lot of areas where we needed to double down and work harder. And so this has been about a four-year process that we implemented. We were all in by the way on how we implemented EOS. So we not only followed all of the principles we used an implementer as well.
We are about a year and a half post-implementer process. And the next phase that we’re in now is if we’ve gone from being a revenue-driven organization to a profit-driven organization.
The next step we’ve taken in some partnerships that we found through EOS is value creation. And so we’re trying to build another level of sustainability into this business that allows a collection of team members and leadership and that kind of a thing to have a very sustainable presence. And it’s fun and it’s scary all at the same time to take another step because, to your point, you’re sharing your baby with others at that point. I think somebody told me there’s actually a book out there called Your Baby Is Ugly that talks about helping organizations share the identity of their business with others and getting that input and that perspective back in.
It’s mostly a good process, though, that we’ve been working through, which is you have these moments where somebody introduces a new concept and you inherently tell yourself all the reasons why it’s not going to work. Then you start kind of problem-solving and you also hit an epiphany at some point where you all of a sudden start seeing that the problems you feel like you’re a victim to are actually solvable in a very different creative way.
And so that’s where it really is interesting. It’s hard. It’s long term or doesn’t have a term that you’re sometimes going through. But that’s an era that we’re in right now where it’s okay we’ve grown ourselves up to this healthy stage that we’re in. We’re about 55 employees, so we’re a good sized marketing firm now.
We know our targets, we know which types of relationships we’ll be successful at. Now we need to make sure that we can create a more predictable engine. We are a project-based organization that sometimes doesn’t really know until all the month’s time has been calculated exactly how much revenue we’ve created and therefore how much profit we’re gonna have. And we’ve been challenged to really think about our business in a different way. And that’s been fun and also a little bit head-splitting to think about DDM in a very different mindset than our legacy approach, which has just been very time-based.
We give value that equates to a certain amount of time, and we bill you for that time. It’s, “How do we start thinking about this in terms of value? How do we make sure that we’re thinking about some of the upfront things that we do that help us execute that are valuable? And then how do we also help in terms of managing work for our clients that would also be valuable to them and to us?”
Let’s talk about those projects and the services. How did you decide what to keep and what to update differently?
Jordan Buning: I think one of the things that we learned about ourselves in the more recent years a little bit is who’s our target audience and what do they want?
As I thought about this, maybe it was a little bit less that we needed to add or delete some specific services. It was really more about the elevation of what they were and how they related to a broader solution. I think a lot of things ultimately within businesses like this get built in silos.
There’s a web team, there’s a client services team or a strategist. There’s a research group, there’s a design team, and they do their things or historically they’ve done their things in those unique silos. What’s starting to happen is those things are all starting to coalesce together. They’re probably all getting used more frequently in the relationships that we have than just a few things getting clicked together.
And so it’s us taking the conversation around. Something like social media to be a part of a bigger content strategy, a website to be part of a broader lead generation effort. All of this data that now exists around advertising, social media and web presence, bringing that into a dashboard and facilitating more actionable information around what that data is doing. And so for us, it’s been about moving up the food chain and not thinking about these things as basic and thinking about ’em in much more elevated terms. Our strategy or relationship with our clients is more C-Suite-focused.
And so fundamentally, if you think about the conversations that are happening in the C-Suite, they’re less interested maybe in some of the more basic marketing metrics, and they’re more interested in organizational metrics. In healthcare, they want to know how many patients they can acquire in various categories, or they may say something like covered lives. How many patient interactions do they have around primary care?
And so our objectives become their objectives in terms of building our marketing strategies around that whole effort.
How did you handle conversations with clients?
Jordan Buning: It’s a good question, and I think the experience of a lot of our existing clients maybe was much more subtle. They were relationships that we already valued and wanted to replicate. And so there were a number of clients that were our best practice relationships already.
What I think we started to do, though, was take a look at some relationships where maybe we were in a more tactical role and very intentionally trying to talk to them a little bit about elevating some of their efforts to more performance-oriented activities, and I think there’s a little bit of natural selection that began to happen. It was less intentional about DDM saying, you are or you are not a great fit for us. And it became a little bit more of a focus on best-case efforts and results.
The majority of the time our clients valued that conversation to happen. They may or may not have had the immediate budgets to dive into maybe a broader strategy or to implement more complex technologies, but we did start working with them on developing more of a roadmap and a mindset toward that.
And because one of our priorities is to help them be successful as individuals, as well as within their organizations. I think they felt most of the time, like we were aligned in terms of what our goals and outcomes were. I think in a few cases where maybe a client wasn’t aligned to that and had a more practical role for DDM one of two things happened.
We either stayed in that role, it was working fine and there were no issues with it. But in a few cases, again, I think there’s a little bit of a maybe just a natural change in the evolution towards other resources that could have either been more affordable or more applicable to the types of resources that they need. And that’s been fine.
We really have felt like we’ve transitioned most of our relationships if they did change and there weren’t a lot of them, but if they did change, they felt like they were healthy transitions as opposed to difficult and territorial or anything like that. We’ve usually been very happy about letting go, handing over assets and files and those kinds of things without any kind of difficulty in the process. A lot of times relationships that we develop in one era come back around. We are the hotbed of West Michigan Nice and are so intent to always taking the high road and doing the right things.
A lot of our clients sometimes either will cycle back around within the organization they had with DDM, a relationship they had with DDM, or they end up in another place.
Their needs have changed and evolved to the level where DDM is now a viable solution again.
How are you measuring business impact with social media specifically?
Jordan Buning: We’re trying to roll back any of our conversations to the first business priorities and organizational goals that they have. And so ultimately, understanding the bigger atmosphere and ecosystem that they’re a part of. With the understanding that we’re not trying to control it we’re trying to make sure we align to it. And so we just ask a lot of questions. Part of our approach is a series of probing questions. We’re trying to bake that down to a set of very curious, open-ended questions that they can answer.
So that we develop an understanding, and we can come back to them and say, “Here’s maybe how we started a conversation. Maybe you said you wanted a campaign, maybe you wanted a new brand advertisement. You wanted a new logo. But what you told us about though was a goal that you had to grow the organization, a particular way to move into a new market, and that kind of a thing.”
And now as we get into the very specific categories of execution, like social media. Here’s a role that we can take. We can go into these environments and be a thought leader. We could go into these environments and give them a look under the hood in a way that maybe traditional advertising can’t do.
And so we really build a series of different messaging pillars and then we roll those over into which things apply to the audiences that we can reach in different social media environments. And then now you may still have some of those traditional metrics that could be either follows or likes or comments and that kind of a thing.
But they also could be linking to some of the broader kind of more lead gen-based activities that an organization may wanna pay attention to as well. We don’t always have seamless connections. Between some of the marketing metrics and the organizational goals in healthcare, we’re not going to see necessarily that trackability across all the different platforms.
But we can see trends and we can certainly pay attention to when we’re doing these things and we’re seeing these kinds of marketing metrics. What is happening with your business metrics on the other side? Are they improving? Are they growing? If we stop, do those things change?
And so we start mapping those things. Against each other at the same time.
What were the biggest mistakes or learning moments in this whole journey?
Jordan Buning: Yeah, I think there’s a series of different kinds of learnings that come, and there are more personal perspectives, but I think one is kind of living in two different worlds: the past DDM and the new DDM.
I think these are interesting challenges. I don’t know if it’s as much of a mistake, but I think it is that is a difficult era to have a foot in two different worlds. And so there is this motivation that I think I’ve developed over time, which is to probably want to go faster. And I think that has different reactions even within my own organization in terms of speed to change and that kind of a thing.
But I think living between two worlds is definitely an interesting challenge that I think we wrestle with. I learned for myself that I think I’m better at painting the picture, the vision of where we would like to go than actually teaching it. If you would’ve asked me as we got into this I could envision myself being very active in a lot of different responsibilities where I’m helping people see a process, see an approach, and effectively do it.
And what I really have learned about myself in this process is I have a system that works really well for me. I may not have a system that works for the masses. We have other people who are really good at seeing what will work for the masses within DDM and how they can actually implement something that more people can see.
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And so I think for myself, I’ve learned the ability to be successful in a variety of different environments within DDM and then help other people be successful are two very different things. I’m really thankful to have a lot of people around that have a better execution than I was able to envision.
I think that’s the last thing is there’s always this bit of a challenge of how do we help elevate people. I think you could never explore what a person is capable of soon enough. I feel like I was afforded early opportunities to either succeed or fail. And I think we live in a slightly different era and time where maybe between the work that we do for the clients that we have, there’s more fear and risk of failure. But I also think we worry a little bit about the impact of having some failures and how we use those as teaching and growing opportunities.
So I’m still a big fan of when I see somebody, regardless of experience and age and anything else, a person who shows kind of some of these more intangible skills to nurture and grow those things as early as possible.
I think those people are quick to engage, quick to take action, quick to explore when they run into roadblocks on how to solve those things. And, sometimes that means they’re gonna bump into things and, I can only imagine the number of times that I made pretty significant mistakes, but somebody didn’t punish me for them but nurtured me through some of those things.
So I want the same for others that I [feel I had for] myself: room to grow.
Do you have someone who’s an integrator or implementer who’s not only helping to make things happen but also stopping you when you hit that impatience and you have too many ideas?
Jordan Buning: Yeah, I do. JoAnne Gritter is our integrator. She is somebody that was recognized within our organization and had a more practical role. She has more of a design background. But she was also already problem-solving within the client group that she had in ways that we recognize were leverageable.
So she moved into an operations role, and then ultimately when the last of our founders retired, she moved into the integrator role and she brings her own unique abilities to that role. And then in addition to it, the rest of the leadership team also has their own unique skills as well. And we are hopefully on our best days, not an echo chamber of affirmations but really challenges with each other.
We just had a quarterly meeting last week, and it was probably appropriate that we met in our attorney’s office because we had some really great battles. And it was great. And I love the fact that there is enough trust within the leadership team that we can go to battle and we can be focused on problems and opportunities that we have in front of us, and we don’t inherently have to take it personally.
I think we all have to work through that in our own moments sometimes, but I think it’s a sign of healthiness to be able to rattle sabers a little bit, just as much as it is to encourage and promote and more of our time feels like that than it does a battle, but I’m equally thankful for some of the challenges that are there and they’re the boots on the ground, whether we’re talking about.
Speed to implementation, a type of technology, a process that’s working. They know it better than I do, and so I’m here to shovel concepts and ideas at them. Things that I get a chance in time and capacity to read or hear about. They have to be the processor a little bit of some of these thoughts and ideas.
And so there is appropriate division between church and state if you implement it this way, that I think is helpful. Because you’re right. I think a visionary naturally wants to go fast, wants to make changes on a dime, and those kinds of things. And while I’m maybe not a raging visionary I think there is always a little more of an unrealistic goal than the rest of the organization may have.
And so we find a good balance.
Share some advice for agency leaders who are about to embark on a journey of their own that’s very similar to the one that you guys started in 2018.
Jordan Buning: I was motivated to make sure that this organization was better when my time is done here than when I started. And so being a second-generation leader it’s an interesting and a little bit of a fear-driven goal that I had in mind, which I wanted to make sure that it was something that our original leaders, who stay in touch with me, are proud of. They can see the legacy of what they started. They can see the evolution of the organization and so can I and I wanna be able to give that then to another group of people. And so those are mindsets that I’ve had to learn to develop and spend more time on is the long-term future looks like.
I guess I’m not that young anymore. So, it’s important to start thinking about: What does it look like when my time is done? What do I want to get out of this organization? What does the organization wanna be at that time as well?
We’ve been forced into thinking a lot more in the long-term view as well as in the short term things that have to happen as well, that are just part of running any organization on a day-to-day basis. But where do we want this organization to be 10 years, 20 years from now, and that kind of thing? And we’ve taken a lot of pride in the fact that we are an agency of 35 years. We’ve seen a lot of organizations that maybe didn’t make the changes that they needed to make. And so they end in a generation.
And so our mindset is very much, no, this is an organization with 50 some people and hundreds of people that are dependent now on the organization with spouses and children and that kind of a thing. Our mindset is very much for the whole how do we continue to make change.
I think the other thing that I’ve been wrestling with a little bit right now is, “How do we not become victims to circumstances that we don’t think we can control?” All agencies, I think, are wrestling with things like margins and increasing costs and those kinds of things. And we can feel like that is just going to be our reality.
But I think there are enough things that have been introduced to us to explore examples that we’ve seen paradigm shifts that we can consider, that we’re very much in control of things if we choose to develop that mindset.
And so I think I’m just really excited for where we’re going. This is the most challenging and rewarding assignment that I think has been given to date is thinking about the viability of this organization. How is this still meaningful in a different moment in time than when it was created in 1990?
I think in a lot of ways our fundamental beliefs and our core values are the same, but we’ll execute in very different way, in a very different times.
Thanks for reading the highlights from this episode with Jordan Buning. Don’t forget to find the Social Pulse Podcast: Agency Edition on Apple, and drop us a review. We’d love to know what you think. Don’t miss other editions of the Social Pulse Podcast like the Retail Edition, Hospitality Edition, and B2B Edition.
