Hello and welcome to another episode of the AIG Design
Podcast. My name is Lee Sean Huang,
Senior Director of Learning and Programs here at AIGA, the
professional association for Design.
Hello everyone, I am Julia Donatello, Design Competition
and Events Manager at AIGA. And today our guest is Carl
Sakis, known as an agency therapist or agency consultant,
also the author of this book, Work Less, Earn More.
We're going to learn more about his practice in coaching and
working with agency owners. But Carl, is there anything else
you'd like to say to introduce yourself?
That's a great intro, I'm looking forward to helping
people. As a starting point, as as
Nishan mentioned you, you had mentioned that you're known as
an agency therapist. Can you elaborate on why you
think your clients see you this way and how and yeah, and how do
you relate the the role of a therapist with the theme of
performance, which is the new theme of this year's program?
Importantly, to clarify, I'm not an actual therapist.
Clients have called me that. I we all benefit from from
therapy with an actual therapist.
But, you know, in my coaching work, agency owners will often
come to me saying that their agency isn't quite where they
want it to be. Now, whether it's an agency, a
studio, technical shop, they often can see where they want to
go off in the distance, but they're not sure how to get
there. The way one owner put it, he's
like, I'm standing at the edge of a field and I can see where I
want to go. I just need to know where do I
lay the asphalt to get there? And and that's where I come in.
People have an idea of where they want to go.
Usually I can help them if they're not totally sure and I
can help them sort out how to get there.
You know, the, the therapist piece of course is, you know,
it's not just knowing what to do.
You know, some of the what is like generally you want strong
profit margins, you want to set boundaries with clients, you
want to do work you're proud of. But getting there can be hard
because our business is a people oriented business, right?
People on your team. If you have a team and clients,
you know, clients are people too.
The thing is, humans are complicated and so a lot of what
I do, even as it's advising on growth, is around how to make
things happen. For instance, you want to do
this, your team member or a client wants to do something
else. How do you find a way to frame
what they want to match up with what you want?
So then they're doing it for their own reason.
So on your website and the name of your book, there is this
promise of working less and earning more.
And so it's like, Oh yeah, there we go.
We can all hold up our books. And so I think it's an another
take on this idea of working smarter and not harder.
And are there any misconceptions that agency studio owners
typically have when growing their business?
I certainly know a lot of designers get into this business
because we want to do the design, the creative side of
things, or if we want to make websites and we're into the tech
side of things, whatever we're into.
And then there's all of these other things about running a
business that are maybe like not what we studied or not what we
think we signed up for. So are there misconceptions as
growing pains as businesses develop, especially from these
creative or technical founders? A lot of the agency and studio
owners are in, in my experience, what what I would call
accidental agency owners. They're really good at the work,
whether it's design or development or strategy or
writing or you know what, whatever the area might be,
clients keep hiring them to do more.
Maybe they start as a freelancer, they start bringing
in other people to help and before they know it, they have a
team and they have a business. And now they aren't in the say
the design tools all day long. They're busy selling and project
managing and doing account management and managing their
team and dealing with problems. And maybe pre COVID when there
were physical offices, you know, maybe they were buying the
toilet paper or making sure someone bought the toilet paper.
And that's probably not what they studied in design school,
though this is true in a lot of industries.
I had a date several years ago with a woman who was finishing
dental school and was doing an orthodontics residency and the
plan was to buy into a practice to become a partner at a dental
office. She had no business training in
dental school. That didn't make sense.
I mean, think of how many dentists are self-employed or
say are working in a small practice.
Even having basic business training would would be helpful.
Which is why certainly I love the the focus around around
performance. I mean, of course that can mean
many things, but you know, if you struggle to run a profitable
business that runs smoothly, you're going to wish you weren't
doing it. And you know, some people will
be happier, not as a business owner, but there are a lot of
benefits. And it ultimately comes down to
being intentional about where you are and what you're going to
do to get to where you want to be.
And and that's often as in my work where I'm helping.
I think we'd like to explore some of these pain points of
running a studio or agency and then we can dive into more about
the book and also learn more about you along the way.
So I think a big one for a lot of designers is pricing and how
we price our work, whether we're billing for time or for specific
deliverables. You've written about this,
you've done a guest post on Shopify and also on your own
site about your pricing philosophy in general.
What's like a #1 pricing mistake you see agencies, studio owners
make when they're that's really holding them back in terms of
profitability? The number one is not charging
enough. For instance, I worked with a
branding studio in Austin several years ago and the owner
was like, I've been doing this for 10 years.
I thought I would be making more money at this point and not
working such long hours. And she liked the work that she
was doing and she liked the team that she had and she liked the
clients she was working with. It just wasn't financially
lucrative. And she was realizing 10 years
in, if she doesn't make a change, it's going to keep going
like that. And then the idea of being able
to retire eventually wasn't going to be an option.
And you know what, what do you do?
And ultimately, I dug in and did what would now be my agency
growth diagnostic. And what I found was that she
was under charging. She was delivering way too much
scope for that price, especially the low price.
And then she and her team were doing a great job on scope
management. In fact, her operations had said
that the agency typically went over budget by 50 to 80%.
Wow. Yeah.
So when I was sharing my advice, I I said, you know, there are
three levers to delivery profitability around your
performance in delivery pricing. Ideally you'd raise prices
scope, ideally you'd include less in the guaranteed scope and
then manage the scope of of the work you're doing, not over
delivering unless it's intentionally said.
And her reaction was, well, I can't raise prices, my clients
don't have much money. And some, I think that was true
to an extent for her focus on fairly small businesses.
I did think some probably had more, but she didn't want to
raise her prices. That was off the table.
Is that OK? You can deliver less scope.
For instance, she was charging what some firms would charge for
just a website. You would get a website and all
of the copywriting on the website and upfront you'd get
the entire brand identity package.
What normally just do websites. I said, what if you, you know,
what if you made those separate modules?
What if it's the branding package and then the website and
maybe there's a discount for combining them, but you know,
they're, they're separate. She's like, oh, I, I could never
do that because then they'd have a bad brand and I wouldn't want
to launch the website. I had a boss like that where a
client was doing a new website. They were like, they didn't have
a problem with their logo. The logo was terrible.
It was not good and he started creating free logos for them
because he wanted it to look good on the website and they
they did not see it. And then she said no to the free
logo. And so I mean, he had invested
time at least he hadn't done a full brand identity package for
them. Or what if it's say there's the
price for the website and the copywriting is an add on and
she's like, well, then the copy would be bad.
It's like, OK, so you've got one lever left, right?
It's ideally you raise your prices and or reduce the over
delivery of the scope. They said then at least you can
manage the scope as you're doing the work.
And the question was, well, how over scope can we go?
And I'm thinking, how much money do you want to lose?
You know, I yeah. So you know, the the challenge
there is that without making some significant changes, she
wasn't going to break out of that that pattern.
There's a book that I recommend called Overcoming under Earning
by Barbara Stanley STANNY. And it's basically about
financial self esteem, about charging what you're worth.
And it's primarily oriented to people who are in an employee
role, but it works for business owners too.
My own coach recommended it to me and I've recommended it to
clients. I recommended it to a client and
she raised her salary within the business like 50% overnight
realizing she was underpaying herself.
That's not going to be an option for everyone, right?
It kind of depends on how money is in the business.
But charging what you're worth does rely on having a target
market that will pay you what you're worth.
But it also ultimately starts with feeling confident about
charging what you're worth in the 1st place to then seek out
those clients. On this note, I'm I'm curious
to, to learn if you think your clients have a clear idea of how
much the the market is charging for similar services that
they're providing or, or if if they don't, and if this is the
type of information that also you bring the service to because
you have had so many clients from different, you know,
locations, you have a clear, I'm assuming that you might have a
clear idea of how much each type of service is usually like a
range, small and, and large businesses.
Or if they're choosing it, even knowing how much it it the
market is charging, but they're choosing intentionally choosing
it to be more competitive, let's say.
I am often advising clients about benchmarking where they're
pricing stay ONS. You know, it's not a scientific
mathematical formula. Plug in all of these things and
here is the exact price. But I've worked to this point
directly with over 600 agencies all over the world, 36
countries, every inhabited continent.
And so, you know, I can tell based on their agency, based on
their target market, based on their overall brand reputation.
Does the do the prices seem high, low or just right, kind of
like Goldilocks and the three bears.
It is worth considering that there are three agency pricing
models, hourly milestone and value based.
And you know, a lot of agencies see value based as sort of the
Holy Grail. And there is value to that,
right? You're charging either value
anchoring based on the potential impact and you're charging a
percentage of that, or it could be a performance fee where
you're charging a percentage of their actual results.
But agencies can do a lot better by fixing things first under
either their hourly model or their fixed scope model.
First. I will say with the rise of
generative AI, hourly is less and less attractive because, you
know, you could build out something that helps your
clients and you've invested dozens or hundreds of hours, but
actually running that new system could take an hour.
Are you fully capturing that based on what you're changing?
Probably not. Hourly still can be a good match
if it's something you've never done before and you're either
not sure how to scope it or it's very speculative, like you don't
know if the client's going to say yes or not.
It's a lot easier to give them a range or a bucket of hours and
then say you're going to get the best possible result within this
budget. I don't know what the exact
result will be, but it will be the best possible option.
Ideally though, after you've done that a couple times or a
few times, you know enough to be able to scope it on a fixed
price basis. One other way to to get clarity
on that is to do what would refer to as paid discovery.
That's where you have an initial engagement, fixed price, fixed
scope, and you're ultimately using that to sort out where the
client is now and what they need.
And then you can quote them on a Phase 2 after.
That I wanted to connect some of the themes in this conversation
to the theme of the season, which is performance.
I think there's the immediate 1 of this financial performance,
right? We're talking about pricing.
And as you just need more money in charging more to really make
the numbers add up in terms of revenue and expenses of running
an agency. But there's also the performance
aspect in terms of not deception, but of like managing
perception of value, right? Especially for things that are
about trying to capture a percentage of future value or
perceived value of design services beyond hourly billing
and things like that. And so you also talk about
things like productized services and we've, you've mentioned
briefly in passing about like finding a niche or a specific
target audience. So this idea of like
productizing can also be a way to like find a better match with
the kinds of clients you want to look for to just streamline
operations as well within an agency.
So not everything is like, you know, a custom package that
we're doing for the first time. So can you talk about what you
mean by productizing, especially for a service based industry
like design? If we think of a continuum
between custom services where it's only from scratch for every
quiet, certainly within certain frameworks, but totally custom
versus product ties where they're picking from the menu of
options, it is a continuum. You can't have product ties with
some customization. And even when you're doing
customize, you're still probably using some templates to get
things done. But the idea of productized is
that if someone comes to you for help, you have a set list of
options. Either it's they start with paid
discovery and then there's more, or maybe you know, for instance,
they want a brand identity package.
You know, there's the small, medium and large option.
Or say you're doing a website, there's something around that as
well. They don't get to pick something
that is true, that is off the men, right?
And the advantage of that is that it's easier to sell because
you can build out all of the marketing and sales materials in
advance because you're selling off a menu.
It's also faster to sell because you're not having to spend as
much time digging into their exact situation and needs.
You need to dig in enough. There's still a consultative
component, but it's less consultative where you need an
expert creative director, for instance, to evaluate a
situation if it's totally custom.
So it does mean that your team and and and you can spend more
time doing the work rather than selling the work and chasing
after flaky prospects who get the proposal and disappear on
you. And from a staffing perspective,
it's also easier to hire a sales business development person,
right? And it's not the creative
director or the founders time of like, OK, this is so custom that
only people deeply engaged in the work and sell it, whereas
it's much easier to train people to learn about different
packages in that sense. For sure and and for anyone
who's listening and it's like, you know, if you're thinking I
love doing custom work, I don't want to productize.
You don't have to there are just as long as you're aware of the
pros and. Cons, I just want to talk about
kind of specific dollar amounts because you wrote an article
about this getting from 1 million to 4 million, now 5
million adjusted for inflation. And obviously just starting out
getting from zero to your first million is already a big
milestone in itself. But you've kind of established
and set like identify this other one of going from 1:00 to 5:00.
So can you talk about the significance of that in terms of
revenue and ensure some highlights from that piece?
When you go from 1,000,000 to 5 million, you're bringing your
annual profits or your EBITDA technically up to if you're
getting 20% net margins. I recommend 20 to 30% net.
That's after all the owners and no other team members get paid.
When you get into the $1 million EBITDA mark, that actually bumps
you up into a higher valuation band.
And so the advantage there is that just by, say, increasing
your revenue from 4 million to 5 million, you actually could take
away potentially an extra $1,000,000 or more when you
sell. And that's, you know, good
thinking of how hard people work at building their agency,
building their studio, those long nights, those stressful
weekends, the challenges that you go through of running a
business. Like like there's a reason that
most people in the world aren't owning businesses.
It is hard and there are a lot of other factors as well, but
it's hard. It's a lot easier to show up as
an employee And, and that, and there's nothing wrong with being
an employee, but you know, if you're running your business,
you want to make sure that your investment pays off the
investment of time and money and stress and, and all that.
And at the end of the day, a potential acquirer, if you want
to sell your agency ultimately is looking at what the
businesses is worth. And the big driver for what the
business is worth is typically going to be a a multiple of your
averaged out annual earnings. For instance, say if that
average is 1,000,000 and you they decide to offer 6X, that
means they would pay you $6 million usually not all upfront
and there's some conditionals to it.
Whereas if they pay you a 4X multiple on one million, that's
paying you 4 million. So what can you do to get from
4:00 to six? Part of it is getting your
underlying profit margins up, growing the financial
performance, but also presenting an agency or studio that people
would want to buy that includes things are running smoothly.
Usually it includes having a strong #2 running things on a
day-to-day basis rather than all of it falling to you, building a
marketing and sales pipeline that isn't dependent on you as
the founder. And there are a number of other
things to do. But you know, when it comes to
planning for the future, especially if you might want to
sell your agency, starting sooner rather than later is
really important. So Carl, let's talk about your
book now. Work less, earn more, which is a
great promise, great title for a book.
And there's also the subtitle of How to Escape the Daily grind of
Agency Ownership. So let's just break down some of
the the big themes as a preview for folks to check out the book.
But what does it even mean to work less and like?
That can mean a lot of different things for different people.
So yeah, what is the daily grind to escape from as well?
Why don't we just kind of talk about what you mean by that?
Working less and learning more are relative.
For some, working less might mean going from 80 hours a week
to 50. For others, it's going from 50
to 40. Maybe it's going from 40 to 10.
For instance, I have a client I've worked with for a number of
years and he now works 1 to 1 1/2 days a week.
The key is that he has a really strong team member who's running
things, You know, we've built a succession plan who's moved up
in the business and is handling things, you know, so that
that's, that's important. Other people might, might say,
you know, maybe they, they want to earn more.
They're OK with their current workload as long as they're
focusing on work that's going to pay off.
Someone might say, you know, I'm working 45 hours a week, I'm OK
with that. I don't need to work less, but I
want to make sure I'm doing the right 45 hours a week.
So that is unique. One of the things that you can
do to help troubleshoot where you are now and identify next
steps is to identify where you are on the day-to-day
involvement meter or gauge. So in the book, there's a
graphic for it. Think of a fuel gauge, right?
Going from empty to full stage one.
That's where you're mandatory. You can't get away.
You can't go out to lunch without something going wrong.
When you get to stage 2, where you're necessary, you can get
away for a few days. You can actually go on vacation
and not at least not have your phone with you all the time at.
Least a long weekend, you know, kind of kind of thing and your
team's taking care of stuff, although not always making the
right decisions, but you know, it's, it's, it's somewhat bad
now. The ideal is to get to at least
stage 3 where you are now needed, not necessary.
You can have vacation for a week or two.
Your team's getting stuff done. They're making good decisions.
You can't disappear for a whole year, but you can get away.
You know that That's generally good.
And if you want, you can go from stage 3 to stage 4, which is
that you're optional. When you're optional, you're
just that if you're doing something is because you want to
do it, not because you have to. And do consider that you can be
in multiple stages at one time in different areas.
For instance, you might be, you might be mandatory, you're
necessary as the sales closer, but you also might be optional
to do the initial screening when an inquiry comes in.
You're not the one that has to do that very upfront vetting.
So you can be in different places at once, but for everyone
who's listening, you might want to think about HA in different
areas of your agency or studio. Where are you now?
Mandatory, necessary, needed, or optional?
And then focus on moving up the stages in the areas that either
are the low hanging fruit, the sort of easy options, and or
start making progress toward the longer term.
If there are things that you really don't like doing, you can
find ways to stop doing it. It may be through help with
current team members and maybe through outsourcing.
It may be through a new hire. It may be changing your
business. I and that's what I do when I'm
advising clients, right? I know where they want to go.
I can see where they are now, I can see where the headaches are
and where the opportunities are and then recommend what to do
next, quick win, what to do now and then lower from priorities
as well. But we all benefit from that
outside perspective. You know, I've worked with my
own coach for 10 years. We all benefit.
Yeah, it sounds like it could be a reallocation.
So it's like hypothetically, if I'm working 50 hours a week on
my agency and maybe I'm still going to be working 50 hours
going forward, but more of that 50 hours is going to be spent on
like the creative part of things.
And I make myself optional, you know, on the, the business
operations and the the finance stuff.
It's like, OK, the earlier we can outsource that, the more I
can actually focus on the creative value and the core
reason I got into this business in the 1st place kind of thing.
So there's some personal choices involved in that less and more
bit. For sure, and and I talked about
in the work fluster and more book a potential order of things
to delegate. Start by delegating typically
the subject matter expert activities.
So like if you're the one doing the nuts and bolts of building a
client's website, there are other people who can focus on
that. I'm not saying never do it
again, but that's something that you can delegate whether to a
freelancer or eventually hire or may be delegated to a curt team
member if you have already. Next thing to delegate would be
project management. That's the behind the scenes.
Usually behind the scenes, although they can be client
facing. You know, when I was APM at
agencies, I was client facing and PMS are focused on getting,
getting the work done smoothly, efficiently and profitably that
they're very performance oriented.
Then after that you have to decide you're probably going to
delegate account management. That's being the day-to-day
contact for the client. They'll probably delegate that
next his whole process to do that.
And then, and then after that, you have to decide, do you want
to continue doing client strategy and or sales.
And you could keep doing both if you want.
If there's one you don't want to do, you can get someone else in
sales. Hiring is hard, Client strategy
is hard. That's why I recommend
delegating the other work, the SME work, the PM and AM first.
That's a great piece of advice. Is there any other actionable
advice that you could give to our listeners from your book?
I know a lot of it is it sort of depends on what you want, but
there any other tips or chapters you wanted to point to when
people check out the book? Well, you know, for people who
get the book or or you can even get free access.
Otherwise, you can go to work class, earn more, book.com, you
can get a free chapter or cover preview, but you can also get
the Workbook for Readers, which takes you through all of the
exercises in the book as a Google Docs.
You've all got it, you know, in one place.
And one of the first exercises is sorting out where do you want
your agency to go. And I have a visualization
technique that I've developed that I've used for myself and
with clients that I call the advanced retrospective, where
you're writing about the future as if it's already happened.
And you could pick a day, five years in the future, 10 years in
the future or a year in the future.
So you start five years in the future.
Today is such and such day. And whatever year or five years
in the future, it's a great day because.
And you just write from there. And if you don't want to write,
you can record it. You know, you can do whatever
works best for you. The idea is that this lets you
explore what does your future, ideal future look like, What are
some things you need to do to get there, and also, how can you
enlist other people on your team and in your life in general to
help you make that happen? If your team knows where you
want to be in five years, they can think about how to help you
get there. They can also think about do
they want to be part of that? If they do, they can help make
it happen. Maybe if the direction that
you're going isn't a match for them, you can part ways sooner
rather than later. Rather than keeping someone
who's become a disgruntled team member.
Getting clear on your ideal future through the Advanced
Retrosective or another visualization tool is really
helpful. And there's a free template for
that in the Work Lesser in Workbook.
And you can also get free access to the workbook at Work Less or
More book.com. That's awesome.
I love this idea of like the future scenario.
Actually for different episode of the season, we had some
Stanford professors authors features come in talk about
featuring more in the macro sense, like kind of almost
sci-fi, kind of the future of tech and and things like that.
But I love using it in this very practical, more immediate way as
well. So it's great to hear you
suggest that as well. It also can come in handy if
you're trying to decide between two different versions.
You might be like, do I want to grow my agency to sell, or do I
want to keep running it for the foreseeable future?
Write two different advanced retrospectives, one where you've
sold and one where you haven't. You're probably going to enjoy
writing one of those a lot more, and that probably gives you the
answer you need. And.
Like filling it in with those details of like, OK, what does
your day-to-day look like here, Weekly flow and schedule look
like? It's like, OK, that really
brings it to life in that sense versus like that very high
level, like, oh, I could sell or I could keep running.
Exactly. Carl, you mentioned that you had
worked with companies around the world, so 30 more, more than 30
countries. I'm curious to hear from you.
How did you see your role in understanding cultural
differences in the context that you were working with, and how
did you navigate this cultural differences?
I can share an example with us. Absolutely.
So you know, a lot of the work that I'm doing is around growing
the business. So I'm, I am not an expert in
the exact work they do, right. Like if someone is not good at
design, I am not going to help them become a better designer,
but I can help them get the rest of the business out of the way
so they can do what they do best.
For instance, when it comes to employment laws, those vary
dramatically depending on where you are within the US, state by
state and outside the US, even more so.
For instance, I had a client in Belgium, they were running a an
agency there. They had a project manager who
was not performing and ultimately it was time to fire
them. And at the time in Belgium, if
you wanted to fire someone, you needed to give them three months
of severance or three months notice.
And then you pay them and they're still doing the job.
However, if someone had joined before a certain point in time,
as this employee had, you would pay six months of severance.
And so that created a challenging situation where the
owner's like, well, I don't know, do I want to put up with
it or do I want to want to make some changes?
That's different from in the US where there's usually very
little regulation about termination details.
So that does mean, for instance, if in Europe, you need to be
really careful before you make a firm hire because you may be
stuck with them. On the other hand, you know, and
this is true for any, any location I had an agency owner
in Australia reached out and say, here's a job that I posted.
Can I get some feedback on the job?
It was for a sales and marketing manager and I said, you know,
this is a great job posting, but from what you described, this
isn't the job you need right now.
So you know that that could be true regardless, but you know,
there tend to be different regulatory impacts.
And certainly in terms of the, the culture of each country
that, that you're working in, my clients tend to be more attuned
to the the specific cultural differences on the creative and
marketing work, but then I'm helping them on, on everything
else. That's great.
And I think what the, the example you brought of the job
description makes a lot of sense in terms of a times we write the
job description, but we don't really elaborate and share with
the team if this is really the case.
So being more intentional in the beginning, so spending more time
may result in a in a in, in hiring a better professional
that will really fit into what that organization needs in that
specific moment. And that's an opportunity also
to use generative AI. You know, whether it's ChatGPT,
Claw, Gemini, other things to say, you know, here's the job
posting. How could I make it better or
what is unclear or, you know, if this is the job posting,
describe the profile of someone who might typically apply.
He might find some gaps. For instance, my team is
currently working with a client that has posted a role and one
of the and they, they have hundreds and hundreds and
hundreds of applicants, but they weren't a match.
And my colleague Diane, who's worked at the agencies for
decades, she's leading that project.
And one of the things that she noticed was that there was no
minimum requirement about experience both doing the work
or managing the work. This is a particular like a
director level role. So they were getting all of
these unqualified people. But I mean, how are they to
know, right? Yes, it had the director title,
but there was no minimum work experience.
And so, you know, it, running a business is hard, you know, and,
and running an agency or studio is especially hard because of
the often intangible nature of the work.
And you know, I see this as a consultant and coach as well,
where, you know, someone could be the chief brand officer for a
company and they hire a plumber to work on something at their
house. It's pretty clear if the plumber
did the job or not. Like things have stopped leaking
or they've installed the new water heater or, or what have
you. But if that chief brand officer
goes to work and they hire an agency now it's suddenly like,
well, is that good enough? It is it even done?
You know, and and so it's hard. You know running an agency or
studio will never be easy, but it doesn't have to be so hard.
I wanted to circle back to this theme of performance.
You know, we've talked about financial performance.
We've talked about performing as a leader, whether as a futurist
to offer these different scenarios or performing value,
communicating value in that sense.
I just want to let you riff a little bit, Carl.
Like are there any other ways that you can think about
performance or what this, what does this word remind you of in
terms of your practice and what you do?
Given my background, you know, I've been an agency PM, director
of client services, director for operations, and then Christian
advisor. Now, I started as a web designer
back in high school, back in the days of Diala, you know, So I've
been in the industry for a long time.
Financial performance is definitely a big thing, but we
can also look at individual, whether you're thinking of it as
human performance or otherwise, around reaching your full
potential as a leader, as a manager.
That's actually the theme of my my next book, book #4 coming out
in 2025. That one is called Calm the
Chaos. Calm the Chaos, which came from
a conversation I had with a client where they'd been really
stressed out at the beginning of the call.
I talked about what, you know, talked through like, sure, what
do you need when you're trying to sort out can be talked
through it, validated their concerns and then help shift
toward, OK, what do we do now? And I checked in at the end of
the call and asked how they're doing and they said I had helped
them calm the chaos. So financial performance is
important, but if you're not enjoying the work most of the
time, I I would fix that. You could have 30% net profit
margins and everything's going smoothly in the business.
But if you're not finding it rewarding, life's too short.
If you're the business owner, life's too short for you to not
have the environment that you want.
And the same thing is true for your team, right?
I mean that there have been fluctuations between whether it
employees versus employers have the, the power in the
relationship. You know, during the great
Resignation, it certainly swung toward employees.
But, you know, my view is it's short sighted to be like, well,
the employers have the power, so let's exploit people.
One of my grandfather's was a business professor at Cornell
for 40 some years, and he was also a management consultant.
I found some of his research from the 1950s.
One of the things he found was that employees wanted to be
treated by their supervisor as a person rather than just a
worker, right. I mean, yet how many companies
struggle with that today? There's another query that he
told. He was doing a consulting
project with a large railroad. And I love trains.
So it's like, oh, great. And he was talking to an
employee about what he liked and didn't like about his job.
And the employee was working in a tower above a real yard and
was switching cars. And the employee said, well, you
know the thing I don't like? Like, it's a hot day.
The sun is beating in all day long.
I wish they'd put in some, you know, blinds, window blinds.
My grandfather said, oh, have you asked him about that?
And the guy said, yeah, they even came out twice to measure
for the blinds, but they didn't do anything.
So they're sort of going along a bit more.
And then the employee points to a boxcar that's coming over the
hill and is going to go down the hill to get coupled up to a
train. And the employee says that
boxcar has 60 tons of explosives on it.
And you know, when I pull back on the brake, like, things don't
always slow down. Sometime there's going to be a
really bad accident. And my grandfather said, oh,
have you told anyone about that? And the employee said, why would
they care about that if they didn't care about the window
blinds? The work that you do as the
owner of your agency or the owner of your studio has an
impact on you and your family and your clients, but also has a
big impact on your team. And the things that I talk about
are work lesser and more and in my coaching, consulting and also
now income. The chaos you can create, the
work environment that you wish you always had for yourself and
for everyone around you. I think that's the really
exciting thing about running your own business.
You're you're building your ideal place.
Yeah, I really love that positive vision, right?
Because I feel like a lot of people do it for these personal
reasons of like, OK, we want to be independent, we want to do
the creative work. And then there's this other
stuff when you bring other people into the team of like,
OK, how do you be, like, a better employer than the people
you worked for or, you know, you see what's wrong?
And then can you be a positive model that way?
Yeah. My parents were both career Army
officers and when I was in high school, I was at a Boy Scout
event and they opened the buffet wine and the scout, who is sort
of the senior scout for the the organization, made a beeline for
the buffet. He was like pushing people out
of the way to get to the Food First and on the way home, my
dad said, and of course now has become the the the book leaders
eat last. But I've heard that from my dad,
you know, years before. And the idea was that in the
army of the military, you know, if you're the boss, you make
sure that everyone on your team has something to eat first
before you help yourself that Now, that doesn't mean you that
I'm not saying don't eat yourself, right?
Like if, if, if there's no food left for you, you need to make
some changes business, you know, using food as a metaphor for,
you know, stress and quality of life and, and, and, and income.
But you know, leaders eat last, but you should eat at some
point. And.
That's a great metaphor, Carl. I'm I'm very curious about
creative process and how that differed from one person to the
other and also in different industries.
So I'm, I'm wondering if you can share a little bit of how is
your process of when you have a new client or even a client in
an industry that you haven't worked with yet.
How is it the process for you to organize yourself, plan what's
best for, for that client? And what are the habit, the
working habits that you have created for yourself?
And how, how has that evolved throughout the years?
You can see like when you started your business and now,
how has it changed? In my work, I focus on
understanding what I call each client's VGR values, goals and
resources. Values on how they choose to
operate, goals on where they want to go, and resources in
terms of time, money, people, software, platforms and so on.
They have available to help make that happen and to understand
their VGR. Some of that comes from
conversations, but I have an intake process where I share
different documents and my team helps with this.
There's an intake questionnaire with like 60 questions about
where they've been, where they want to, where they are now, and
where they want to go. Also take a look at how they
spend their time. Take a look at members of their
team, take a look at their clients.
Also do a disk behavioral assessment DISC and I'll add new
questions as I go. For instance, one that I've
added is in terms of the how much pushback do they want as
I'm, as I'm sharing, sharing feedback, do they want me to
push hard? If, if I have concerns or it's a
bit softer or a bit in the middle.
So that way I know where they're coming from, you know, push
harder or not or somewhere in the middle.
Another one I added was around the relationship with money from
growing up. You know what?
And how has that impacted them today?
For instance, you know, working with a client who mentioned
that, you know, growing up there was the idea that that money are
in business was associated with being greedy.
And for sure there are businesses that are very greedy,
but that doesn't mean you have to operate your agency or studio
like that. You know, if there's a downturn,
I believe that the owner should cut their pay first.
At some point, you may need to do layoffs.
But you know, it's the job of the senior team to make
sacrifices first, not forever, but first.
So understanding their relationship to money is really
helpful. And also, you know, what is
their larger support network? You know, I'll mention, for
instance, I have my therapist, I have my coach, I have my CPA.
You know, what does that look like for them?
That helps me understand the context that they're in and
other people that can support them.
So ultimately my goal is to understand clients, not just the
numbers, but where they are in life in general and where they
are as a person so that I can help them the best way that I
can. So it seems like as your
grandfather, as research, you're also looking at your clients not
only as clients, but as as humans, right?
So, yeah, and, and I, I think going back to the beginning of
why do clients sometimes call me their agency therapist?
I, I, that's part of it, right? Understanding them as people
rather than just the numbers. The numbers are important.
That often gives me things to focus on in my recommendations.
But it needs to be custom to them, their values, goals and
resources, rather than just, you know, just do this.
That's great. And as we are now starting a new
year, I'm I'm wondering what type of professional challenge
you're you're seeking, you're looking for and you wish to have
in in a year time? I, I mean, certainly, you know,
finishing and, and publishing the Calm the Chaos book, which
is in editing, editing now. So that that's going to happen.
I did have a client who who was an advance advance feedback
person on the book and he was like, you know, this is great,
but what about Tom the client chaos, right?
You know, it is like employees can create some chaos, but what
about what about clients? And like, oh, I think that'll
need to be by 2027. But so, you know, we'll, we'll,
we'll get started on that. A new series.
Yeah. It's going.
To be the next like what is it the chicken soup for the
different? Exactly.
Yeah. So I, I think certainly, you
know, releasing that and you know, doing both one-on-one work
with, with agency and studio owners through coaching and,
and, and other things, but looking for ways to help people
stay ahead. I'm helping with the Bureau of
Digital on their AI in your agency workshop.
I went to the first one in 2023. I recommended the 2024 one to
clients and I'm helping promote the 2025 one.
AI is not the solution to all of our problems, but it is a
solution to a number of problems.
And so for agency owners, I'm not saying you need to spend,
you know, 8 hours a day on AI, but it is worth exploring how
can you use it? And you know what, where are the
right places to invest rather than, rather than, Oh no, you
know, there's no way we could do that or oh, we're going to fix
everything with AI. Like you need to find the right
balance for you and and your firm.
Following up on that, you know, mentioned AI in a few different
contexts already and you also gave us a comparative look about
running agencies, studios in different countries.
But are there other macro trends that you would like to share
with our audience in terms of what it's like for the agencies
out there right now? Five years I ran Acmo networking
Group through the American Marketing Association and so I
was the only non CMO in the room.
And, you know, if we think of CM OS or chief brand officers or
others as often the primary buyer of agency services,
whether they're the direct buyer or someone lower in their
hierarchy is CMOS are juggling a lot.
You know, they're, they're smart people, but they have to cover
so many different things that your opportunity as the agency
or the studio had and your team around educating clients about
what's next, not just reactively, but proactively so
that they see you as the source of strategic advice.
You're the strategic partner rather than just being a mere
order taker. But that's not going to happen
by accident. You have to make time to share
that information. You have to make sure the
clients understand it based on their level of skill set and
things like that. But ultimately, when you do
that, you know, I send a monthly VIP newsletter to current and
pass appliance sharing, you know, based on where we are on
the year and where, where things appear to be going, my
recommendations on where to focus.
And that's one of those. I write it once and then goes
out to everyone. So think about what you can do
to keep your clients up to date so that you can be proactive and
so that when a new opportunity comes in, they ask you first,
what should I, what should we do about this?
You want to get that call rather than we're doing this, go fill
this out. So help, help your clients
succeed. You know, they're, they're the,
you know, in the hero's journey, they're the hero of the story.
You're the helper or, or the mentor.
Help them become the hero of their story.
That's great. And Speaking of recommendation,
as we wrap up, we usually ask our the participants to share
something that has inspired them in in recently.
So it could be a book, a movie or some other piece of media
that's that you would like to to share as a inspiration.
I'm a big fan of the book Meltdown, Why Our Systems Fail
and What We Can Do About It by Clearfield and Tilksack.
It's not a new book, but it's really valuable and one of the
key takeaways from it. The idea is that they're looking
at when things go wrong, it's usually a systems failure rather
than an individual failure. Yes, maybe someone did something
that triggered the problem and they're looking at, you know,
nuclear meltdowns and, and things like that.
And one of the points is that failures are usually systems
failures, like a bunch of things went wrong and that happened.
So ideally we simplify the systems, fewer steps, fewer
linkages. But when you can't because
there's only so much you can do to simplify things, look for
opportunities to reduce tight coupling.
For instance, the, you know, air flying version would be you're
connecting somewhere. If it's a 30 minute connection,
even if one thing goes wrong, you're probably going to miss
the second flight. Whereas a three hour connection
you're probably fine. Several things go wrong, you're
still going to make the flight. Of course, the balancing act is
if everything's on time now you're waiting there for three
hours instead of potentially just getting right on the next
plane. So, you know, the key thing is
that as you're making decisions and assigning things out to your
team, are you introducing tight coupling?
And if, if you have to, if that's the only way, make sure
you're budgeting in extra time or extra quality assurance
review or something else to deal with that accordingly.
But ideally, say no to tight coupling when you can, and if
you can't, make sure the client is paying a rush fee to cover
everything. Else, thank you for this really
insightful conversation, Carl. And just to take us out, can you
repeat your URLs and information about your book, both your
current one and your upcoming one, as a call to action for our
audience? Absolutely.
So 33 websites. My main website, which has
hundreds and hundreds of articles and other free
resources is Sakis andcompany.com.
That's SAKASAND the word company.com.
If you're interested in learning more about the work less, earn
more book that's at work less earn more book.com, including
all of all the Amazon links worldwide, print, Kindle,
Audible as well, including the free workbook and the free
sample chapter. And if you're interested in
getting on the notification list for the new book, or if you're
listening to this, say later in 2025 and then you want to get
the book, you can go to Calm the Chaos dot XYZ.
Calm the Chaos dot XYZ. Awesome.
Thank you so much and thank you for listening or watching.
See you next time on another episode of the AIGA Design
Podcast.