First, a quick favor? The AI Agency Survey closes on Wednesday, April 29, and I’d appreciate it if you take 5 minutes to fill it out. We’ll all learn a lot from what others are doing with AI today. (Also, please consider forwarding it to a couple of other agency leaders.)
Here in New Hampshire, the grass is just starting to grow again — which means the weeds won’t be far behind.
Most of us don’t want to be in the weeds in our own yards, and we definitely need to stay out of the weeds when it comes to our teams and clients.
I’ll explore this idea a bit later in this newsletter, but first let’s see what Jen has rounded up for us this week.
— Chip Griffin, SAGA Founder
Latest from SAGA
MANAGE YOUR AI BEFORE IT MANAGES YOUR BUDGET. AI pricing was never going to stay at introductory levels forever, and the correction is happening now. In this week’s SAGA Signals AI Brief, I wrote about what the end of AI’s free lunch means for agency owners — and why “wait and see” is riskier than most realize when both costs and capabilities are moving fast.
THE ENTRY-LEVEL PROBLEM YOU TO SOLVE TODAY. Junior staff aren’t obsolete, but the old way of giving them routine work is. If your agency hasn’t figured out what a new hire should be doing in an AI-assisted workflow, you may be saving pennies today, but you’re ensuring you have no one to promote in five years. Chip and Gini dug into all of it on the latest Agency Leadership Podcast.
Jen’s Weekly Roundup
WHAT CAUGHT MY EYE THIS WEEK:
LIKE CHIP SAYS, BUILD TO OWN — Upsourced reminds agency owners in How to Build (and Sell) a Service Business that most people don’t start an agency thinking about an exit. But the decisions you make early may shape what the business is worth later. David C. Baker at Punctuation is also worth reading this week on Investing in Ee Retreats at Remote Firms. Most remote firms pocket the savings from dropping their office lease and call it profit. Baker argues you should be reinvesting much of that into building the culture you’re now lacking.
ENTRY-LEVEL HIRING AND THE AI PROBLEM — For PR Daily, David J. Chamberlin tackles the same subject as this week’s Agency Leadership Podcast, but from a different angle. In AI Has Changed Entry-Level Hiring. Most Interviews Haven’t. he covers how candidates are using AI throughout the hiring process, when most agency interview processes were designed for a very different world. The skills you need to be testing for have probably shifted.
NEW BUSINESS AND WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE PITCH — David C. Baker and Blair Enns at 2Bobs dig into Three Patterns of Lost Opportunities, examining the most common situations where you may be losing more pitches than you’d like. Over at The Innovative Agency, Sharon Toerek talks with Shamir Duverseau about what happens after a prospect finds you in Win the Post-Click Advantage. Most agencies obsess over getting the click. Fewer think about what the prospect experiences next.
AI + EARNED MEDIA — For Immediate Release takes on Should Companies Embrace Shadow AI?. Many agencies have employees using AI tools the agency didn’t choose and may not even know about. If your agency is one of them, how will you handle it? And Gini Dietrich at Spin Sucks gives us Visibility Engineering Is the New Playbook for Earned Media, helping you to chart a pattern that leads to credibility. Both are good listening if you’re still figuring out where AI fits in how you serve clients.
— Jen Griffin, SAGA Community Manager
Get out of the weeds
It can be really challenging as an agency owner to avoid getting mired in the details. We have all worn every hat in our own businesses, and we probably do most tasks faster and better than others.
But the deeper we get into the weeds, the more it irritates our team and cheapens us in the minds of our clients.
Many of us had micromanagers as bosses at some point in our careers. We know how suffocating it can feel, yet it’s hard to resist the urge to offer very detailed, specific “advice” to our employees.
Most of the time, we don’t even see it as micromanaging. We actually think we are helping them do their jobs and creating a better result.
And sometimes that may be true, but at what cost? Often the improvements are minor compared to the time spent and the employee growth we inhibited along the way.
When we think about getting in the weeds, though, it isn’t just about our own team members. That’s the area we probably think about most, but the real risk comes when we get into the weeds in front of clients.
Let me explain.
When owners show up to routine client calls, it makes us look like just one of the team. We’re not much different than the entry-level account person the client sees next to us in the Zoom call, other than we probably talk a lot more.
I often talk about the importance of owners sprinkling “magic fairy dust” in client relationships, but that can only happen if we’re not mired in the details and showing up to every call and meeting.
Our appearance should elevate the conversation. Otherwise, we lessen the value of our expertise and make it harder to justify our rates and our role.
Clients who see us handling execution begin to think of us as tacticians. When that happens, it becomes much more difficult to be the trusted advisor who gets called in for the big strategic questions. Those are the conversations that protect retainers and drive growth.
The same goes for our teams. When we hover over every deliverable, we send a message that we don’t trust them to do the work. Good people notice, and the best ones eventually leave to find a boss who does.
Getting out of the weeds doesn’t mean disengaging. It means being intentional about where you show up and why.
Pick the moments that matter. The kickoff. The strategic review. The difficult conversation. The new business pitch. The check-in that reminds a long-time client why they hired you in the first place.
Let your team own the rest. They’ll grow faster, your clients will value you more, and you’ll finally have the time to build the business you want to own.
