300 episodes in: what’s changed, what hasn’t, and what we got wrong

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Chip Griffin: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it turns out it’s not just another episode,

Gini Dietrich: it’s not!

Chip Griffin: Of this podcast.

Gini Dietrich: It’s very exciting!

Chip Griffin: Through the magic of counting, we believe as best, best we can tell

Gini Dietrich: We believe, we think

Chip Griffin: According to our producer, Jen, that this is episode 300. And so we’re going with it. We’re gonna stamp it and say, this is the 300th episode of this podcast.

Gini Dietrich: A big accomplishment. Remember we sat across from at a restaurant across from Wrigley Field and talked about doing this, and here we are.

Chip Griffin: I, yeah, that was what, seven, eight years ago now?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Pre pandemic, for sure.

Chip Griffin: Long, long time ago. Yeah.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: I had hair back. No, I didn’t have hair back then.

Gini Dietrich: No, you did not.

Chip Griffin: Still bald, but, but yeah. Who, who would’ve imagined it would still be going Yeah. This many years later. I mean, it’s crazy. You know, we’re no FIR, you know, we’re not up to episode 4,722 or whatever, whatever Shel and Neville are up to.

But, nevertheless, it is an accomplishment. And so we thought we would recognize this milestone and maybe do a little bit of reflection on those 300 episodes.

Gini Dietrich: So we were joking with one another that this is probably the most prepared we’ve ever come for one of these episodes. We actually put some,

Chip Griffin: I’m fairly certain it is the most prepared.

We’ve actually exchanged a few emails. We did a little research.

Gini Dietrich: Yes, yes, yes.

Chip Griffin: We’ve got Claude involved with it. I mean, we’ve, we’ve put some effort into this one.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. So I think what we both were looking at is a couple of things. One, sort of what has shifted over 300 episodes, which is several years.

Right. And we have had many things happen during that time, including a complete shutdown. Where many agencies, if… Didn’t go out of business, got very, very close, myself included. It was a rough time. So a lot has changed. And so we wanna talk about that. We wanna talk about sort of where our own thinking has shifted over the years, especially around AI and some certain things.

And then at the end, we’ll do a lightning round.

Chip Griffin: Excellent. Well, maybe we can start with some of the things that we’ve talked about a lot over the course of those 300 episodes and, and being, you know, lazy, efficient, whatever you wanna call it, I decided to ask my Microchip assistant, which is backed in part by Claude to assess the episodes that we’ve already done and find the common themes that we talk about a lot.

And so there were 10 common themes, and I’ll run through them quickly and then maybe we can react to a few of them, but, not surprisingly, the first one is the importance of good communications.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: I think we do talk about that one a lot. Um, Understanding your financials, obviously we beat that one to death.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: One-to-one meetings, obviously. That is, that is my,

Gini Dietrich: yep.

Chip Griffin: My pet project to try to get every manager to have one-on-ones with every single one of their direct reports every week. Pricing and positioning, obviously that’s a common topic, not just for us, but everybody in this space. So that one’s not particularly surprising.

It always depends, right? That is how we sign off. That should have been top of the list though. It should have been number one. That’s, that’s my biggest issue with, with this Microchip analysis that, it depends, it doesn’t prioritize at top of the list. Build to own, obviously something that I talk about a lot in various forms.

Well, haven’t done a good job of always, you know, branding it as such, but focused on that. Talking about the agency owner modeling behavior and that everybody takes their cues. When we talk about agency culture, it’s all about what the, the owner themselves does. Mm-hmm. So, that is important.

We talk about the, the idea of having some kind of focus and saying no to things. Not just doing everything that you could, serving every client that you could, but really having a plan. We talk about learning from mistakes. We’ve made a lot of ’em over the course of our careers, but we try to learn from them. And that’s one of the, the big benefits of this show is that we’re able to share those experiences. So hopefully you don’t repeat the same things that we’ve done wrong over the years.

And finally, focusing on collaboration instead of competition, not viewing all other agencies and agency owners as the competition or worse, the enemy. And instead trying to figure out what we can all learn. From each other.

So those were the key themes that, that were identified, that’s a pretty fair representation of the things that have come up, quite often. But I didn’t know if there were things there in particular that you wanted to react to or perhaps things that you thought of that our friend Claude may have overlooked.

Gini Dietrich: No, I don’t think he, I don’t think our friend Claude overlooked anything. I think there are four things, four areas that, of those 10 that I think are incredibly important and those are, you know, even, even as agency owners, we may hate these things. They still are true, so.

Communication fixes most problems. So, that transparency, being able to have conversations with your team and with your clients. You know, not being conflict avoidant.

Knowing your numbers, of course. So understanding what your revenue versus your gross margin versus your net profit, net margin. And all of those numbers mean.

Focusing on particular wins. So again, saying no to some things.

And then the owner sets the temperature. So that your team and your clients react to the way that you move things and that you do things and the way you set boundaries of all that. So I think those are the four sort of, to me, big themes that we’ve focused on in the last 300 episodes.

Chip Griffin: I would agree with that. And I think that communication doesn’t just solve problems. It prevents a lot of problems. Mm-hmm. And I think that the irony is, we’ve said this before, we are all in communications in some fashion or another, probably if we’re listening to this show, whether you are in PR or marketing or whatever, it’s all about communication.

And yet we often do a very poor job of it ourselves and our teams don’t necessarily do a good job of it. And so, you know, we need to really double down and focus on that as much as possible because it will help us to avoid problems or as you say, solve problems. So, I’m glad that that did come out on the top of the list in all seriousness.

And not, it depends because I think that that is almost everything that we discuss here, there is at least some element of communications to it.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s exactly right. And, you know, we’ve talked over the years about certain things like being able to, because you are having constant communication with your clients, being able to, you know, for lack of a better term, upsell and extend retainers and get more out of things.

And I think right now we’re in, I mean, everybody knows the world is on fire and it’s not good. And I’ve been having lots of conversations with lots of agency owners. Mostly who are friends, not necessarily clients about how their businesses are taking off a big hit. And so I’m sort of repeating the same things that I recommended, and I think you probably are doing the same in 2020 when we all took big hits, which is find the project work, do things that you can do.

You know, for, not a retainer, but like small things. So do an assessment first for $5,000 and then build that into some, you know, specific projects sprinkled throughout the year. And then maybe next year you build that into a retainer. But really being open to the idea that you’re not necessarily gonna be able to build on retainer business right now, but you can do the, that project work.

And you know, people still need to communicate. People still need to market their businesses. You just have to find creative ways to be able to help them.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, and I think that that’s great advice at all times. Yeah. And, if we think back to the start of this conversation that we had back in 2018, there’s a lot of things that have taken place over the last eight years that we would not have predicted while we were sitting there. No, over that, that, that lovely lunch there. Outside of Wrigley Field. we would never have anticipated a shutdown due to a virus. Most of us would not have imagined a war as widespread as what we’re dealing with now and all of the other things that came along the way too.

Those are just two of the biggest things in the last eight years. Yep. And so I think that, you know, always being willing to adapt and be agile and, you know, just talk things through and understand, you know, what’s on the minds of your team? What’s on the minds of your clients and prospects, and trying to find how you can relate to them as, as best as possible and, find ways to solve their challenges, even if it means adapting to the approach that you would typically take.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely. I think that’s yes. And, you know, I keep being, I keep thinking about the quarterly review that we like to do inside my business, which is every quarter you’re having conversations that are advancing the next quarter. Right. So we, where I think eight years ago we talked about annual planning and retainers and things like that.

And now my own thinking has shifted from that to quarterly planning and ensuring that we continue and truth be told, that has, that shift has provided us so much more opportunity for growth and for building the relationship inside our clients’ organizations because we’re constantly showing results.

We’re constantly showing what’s worked. We’re constantly showing what hasn’t worked. And we’re constantly making recommendations for shifting things so that we can continue to grow. That has provided a much bigger opportunity and for me that has been a big shift that I’ve made in the last eight years for sure.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And I think, you know, some things haven’t shifted in the last eight years, right? I mean, some of the things that, that we talk about, you know, do hold up. The format of the show itself has, has held up. We have not made any substantial changes despite all of the, the entreaties we’ve gotten to have guests and all, all of the ridiculous pitches that we get from people.

Oh, so and so would be a great guest on your show. You know, I listen all the time. No, you don’t.

Gini Dietrich: No, you don’t. No.

Chip Griffin: 300 episodes in. Zero guests.

Gini Dietrich: Never a guest.

Chip Griffin: We have never brought a guest on this show to talk with us. So it hasn’t changed. It’s just the two of us and I think that works out well. So,

Gini Dietrich: yep.

It’s never changed.

Chip Griffin: At least it does for us. And you know, if it happens to work for you as a listener, that’s great too. But as we’ve said before, we kind of do this show more for us than, than anything else.

Gini Dietrich: I think that, you just a couple of weeks ago, you had an idea to use AI to respond to those pitches, and I think you should do that.

Chip Griffin: Well, actually, I, I, I believe that, that, well, yes, that was one idea. The other idea I had was to respond in sort of bro like fashion to them. Well, actually no, the, you’re right, the AI was for the pitches. Then the other one I was gonna do though was for all these people who pitch on, you know, you can get 300 new leads, leads this month, you know, and I was gonna give the, the, you know, that’s awesome, bro.

Or something like that. Forget what, what my, I, I had some line that seemed…

Gini Dietrich: Yes, please do that.

Chip Griffin: Wacky and cool at the time.

Gini Dietrich: Yes, I like it.

Chip Griffin: But I hate all of these and I just, my inbox is terrible full of these things. I know. So stop it.

Gini Dietrich: Stop it is right. Yes.

Chip Griffin: Since all of you people pitching this podcast listen all the time. Listen to me.

Don’t do it.

Gini Dietrich: Please do not pitch this podcast.

Chip Griffin: So I don’t know, have I gotten crankier over 300 episodes? I’m not sure.

Gini Dietrich: I don’t think you’ve gotten crankier, but you know, one of the things that has been fun for me to watch personally about you and what you’ve changed your mind on is artificial intelligence itself.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. That is certainly an area where I have, I prefer to call it evolved. And, you know, I, as a technologist, I have always been enthusiastic about the concept of AI. I was, I was skeptical a couple of years ago about how fast it would really be able to take hold, and I thought that frankly, a lot of agencies were overemphasizing AI a couple of years ago and being too optimistic about where things would be near term.

And now the pendulum has swung, in part because the technology has improved so much, right? I mean, yeah. If, if you look at the various models and you, you run the ones that were ever present two or three years ago. They are nothing like,

Gini Dietrich: right.

Chip Griffin: What we have with Claude and chat GPT and that today.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: And I was reminded of that recently because I installed a local LLM on one of my machines just to sort of play around with it. And it did the wacky hallucinations because one of the things I always like to do is, as most of us do, I ask for information about myself. And it completely invented an entire narrative about me that had no bearing on reality whatsoever.

But it said it really confidently, and I mean, it, it had a lot of detail, but it was just totally made up. And I said, this doesn’t sound right. And it came back with, oh yeah, you’re right. I made that up. Okay. Okay. And this is one of the, I forget which, it was one of the Quinn models, I think. Wow. Oh no, it was, uh, no, it was the…

one of the Google ones. But anyway, it doesn’t matter what it was. The point is that it experienced the same problems that we saw a few years ago. And if I was still seeing that today from Claude, I, I would not believe as I do now that agencies are actually under emphasizing the impact

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: Of AI. And we’re seeing it evolve at such a rapid pace that I think you really do need to be coming along with it and not continuing to fight it. Which I still see way too much of, in the agency industry. And I think that’s, that is something that, that really hasn’t changed over 300 years. Uh, 300 years.

Gini Dietrich: 300 years. Geez. We are older than dirt.

Chip Griffin: 300 episodes. I mean, if we, if we look back to 2018, there was a lot of resistance to change in the agency community. Mm-hmm. Back then. It’s just what the change is is has changed. But that general mindset, that has always worried me about the agency community, continues to be there and people getting too excited about the wrong kind of change.

We had an episode recently where we mocked the holding companies for, you know, inventing subscriptions. So, you know, the, there are, there are things that have changed, there are things that haven’t changed, but AI is certainly at the top of my list for where my thinking has evolved over the years.

Gini Dietrich: And I think you’re right. Like the, I mean, you know, since 2022 I have been all in on AI because I think it’s pretty phenomenal. And I think part of the challenge that we’re seeing right now is that people are being told that their jobs are going to be replaced. And agency owners and agency employees are being told by clients that their AI can do what they can do.

And, and truthfully, it can, it can do your news releases, you can do your blog posts, it can do all of those things, right? And it’s actually pretty good. What it can’t do though is critical thinking and emotional intelligence and, you know, ethics and crisis and reputation and those kinds of things. So I believe that AI is not going to replace you, but people who know how to use AI effectively will.

So those are the things that you have to be thinking about is how do you use it to enhance the work that you’re doing for clients and train your team to do the same. So that you are continuing to stay abreast and advanced versus getting replaced by an agent, an AI agent, in a year or two.

Chip Griffin: See, I guess the pendulum has swung so far for me that I actually disagree with you on most of the things that you had on your list that AI can’t do, um, including the things that people tend to put at the top of their list.

Uh, emotional intelligence. If you look at, I mean, there are a lot of people who are effectively using these chatbots as their therapist because it is good.

Gini Dietrich: It’s so dangerous.

Chip Griffin: Perhaps, however, that’s the reality, right? And so people are perceiving it to be more emotionally intelligent because it’s responding in a way that a lot of our, you know, human friends and acquaintances might not, for whatever reason, right?

Because a lot of people, you know, even if you have good emotional intelligence, it’s different than how you actually communicate with somebody about that. Right? So I think that there are, there are a lot of areas where the AI, if not today, in the very near future, is going to be able to do it just as well as most of us in our jobs.

And so we need to think about how do we do more? How do we apply that extra human bit on top of it? And I’m not intending to turn this into a whole AI show again. We’ve done a couple of those. I’m sure we’ll do quite a few more. But, you know, I, I think that the fundamentals remain. And when we think about the importance of communication, that is still a piece that at least for now, we have the human touch that we can apply to it, that the AI can’t.

And so, you know, we want to make sure that we’re finding ways to weave that in. But a lot of the strategy and details, I mean, that… AI is absolutely coming for your job on that.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I don’t know if I necessarily agree at a strategic level. I think that the… I think that you’re right if the inputs that you’re, you are giving it are correct and strategic and smart, like I’ll give you a really good example.

We finished the PESO Model certification a month ago. And it took me a really, it took me about six hours for every lesson and there were, there are 10 to 12 lessons in every module. So it was a significant amount of content creation and thinking for me. And I used AI for some of it. I used it to help me organize it and to help me outline and those kinds of things.

But I did the actual work, right? Fast forward to today. I’m working on the recertification, so I took all of the scripts and videos from 2020. I took all of the scripts and videos from 2024 when we did a refresh, and then I took all the scripts and the videos from this new one and I put them all into a folder, and then I use Claude Cowork and I said, here’s what I’m trying to do.

I want to show, because the 2026 version has changed so much. I don’t necessarily want people who got certified between 2020 and 2025 to have to go through the whole certification again. But they do have to understand what all these changes have. So I, I prompted it and I, it probably took me about 90 minutes to prompt it the way I wanted it. But the output, because it has so much content, is so good that it’s taking me about an hour a lesson now instead of six.

Mm-hmm. So I agree with you that I think it can do those things, but I think it still needs us to provide the correct inputs to understand what kind of output we’re looking for, and really to understand strategy. Because if you don’t understand those things, it’s still gonna give you slop. Regardless.

Chip Griffin: Right, right. I mean, effectively, as we alluded to on a recent show, it’s turning everybody into managers, right? Yes. So, even if you were not a manager before, you, now you are being forced to manage the AI effectively as an employee. And, so you need to understand how to do that. Yes. And so it makes, it puts a premium on management skills, which we know is a large area of weakness for most small agencies in general, even before the era of AI.

So, before we run out of time, I know that you also had an idea for a, a lightning round. And as I said in our pre-show conversation, I mean that, that basically is what all of our shows are. It’s just a, it’s just a lightning round because we come up with a topic 30 seconds before we hit record.

Gini Dietrich: Right, right.

Chip Griffin: And neither you nor I have. Any idea, I don’t even know what my opening is going to be. Right. As is painfully obvious on some of the shows. I certainly don’t rehearse the closing out, because a number of those are really crash landings at best. So, let’s, let’s see. I know you did share these, uh, questions with me in advance, but I didn’t really have a chance to look at them.

Gini Dietrich: Okay, good. So let’s let that’ll make it better then.

Chip Griffin: Let’s see where we go with this.

Gini Dietrich: All right. You ready? Sure. Worst, worst advice agencies still believe.

Chip Griffin: That you need to grow by adding more clients.

Gini Dietrich: Oh, I, I think the not tracking time one, like, everybody’s like, oh, we don’t track time. We don’t bill by the hour. Okay, don’t bill by the hour. But you still have to track time because otherwise you have no idea if you’re profitable by client, by employee. You still have to bill time.

Um, best decision you ever made that felt scary at the time?

Chip Griffin: Hiring my first employee.

Gini Dietrich: Oh, I would agree with that. Yep. Totally agree with that one.

A red flag you now spot instantly in prospects?

Chip Griffin: Unreasonable expectations.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I’d say like, yeah. If they, and especially if they can’t answer the budget question. Bye.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, to, to me it’s that with the expectations that just my experience has been you really, if, if someone comes in expecting something, it’s almost impossible to talk them back to a reasonable place.

So if, if someone’s coming in with wild ideas, you’re gonna get me in the Wall Street Journal next week.

Gini Dietrich: Okay.

Chip Griffin: Unless they, they immediately capitulate as soon as you point it out.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: Probably not gonna work out.

Gini Dietrich: No, that’s a good point. All right.

And then aside from, this is the last one, aside from what we’ve already talked about with AI an “I was wrong” prediction from early episodes.

Chip Griffin: I mean, usually I’m so right. It’s really, it’s really hard to think about what I might be wrong about. I mean, to be honest, AI is really the thing that jumps out for me where I’ve had a clear change of position. I’m not… off the top of my head, I can’t think of anything substantial that I’ve significantly changed.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I don’t think I’ve necessarily changed my mind, but I’ve evolved on some certain things like, you know, growth from more clients to better clients. From hiring the best to building systems and process, which, you know, eight years ago if you told me I had to build process, I would’ve been like, but now I, now I understand the, the importance and value in process.

Chip Griffin: Yeah.

Gini Dietrich: I still don’t wanna buy it, build it, but.

Chip Griffin: Maybe outside of a lightning round, I can go back and look and, and find some things and we can have a future episode where we talk about, you know, other areas where we’ve evolved. Because I think, I think it can be interesting to look at not just what we’ve evolved on, but why.

Sure. And oftentimes the why can reveal things. So maybe we’ve, we’ve come up with an idea for, you know, another 300 episodes by doing that.

Gini Dietrich: Perfect. Another eight years.

Chip Griffin: Another eight years. Man, I’m gonna be old. You of course will stay young.

Gini Dietrich: No, of course. Yes.

Chip Griffin: Check. Alright. So with that we’ll wrap up this 300th episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast.

We really appreciate all of you who take time to listen to every single one of those episodes. And please, if you’ve listened to all 300, please drop us a note. We would love to hear from you.

Gini Dietrich: We would, yes. Yes.

Chip Griffin: I kind of doubt that anyone has listened to all 300, but if you have, we would certainly like to hear from you. If you have ideas for other future episodes, we’re always looking for those as well. Particularly now ’cause we’ve done 300 of them. And so a lot of times we’ll search and say, oh, we already talked about that.

Gini Dietrich: We do.

Chip Griffin: But the beauty is it’s been over eight years. So we can talk about the same thing that we talked about eight years ago because, you know, a bunch of, you weren’t even agency owners eight years ago.

Yep. So that’s, you probably didn’t hear us talk about it. So with that, I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.