Episode 73 Transcript

Brent Trimble: Welcome to the Professional Services Pursuit, a podcast featuring expert advice and insights on the professional services industry. Again, I’m Brent, and today I’m joined by our guest, Anthony Gindin, who’s the founder and CEO at Agency Different.

Over the past 23 years, Anthony has built six companies, sold four of them, and taken two public on the Canadian Stock Exchange. He’s worked with executive leaders in more than 17 countries, spoken at events around the world, and his second book, The Agency Secret, just became an international bestseller in Canada, the US, Australia, and Germany.

He has also been jokingly referred to as the Canadian Don Draper. Anthony, we’re going to have to talk about that a little bit, but I’m really excited to talk to you today about his belief that growth is pointless if it’s not profitable and to learn more about how he helps agencies develop the deeper foundations, strategies, and systems they need to fuel consistent and profitable growth.

Welcome, Anthony.

Anthony Gindin: Hey Brent, thanks a lot. I really appreciate you having me on the show.

Brent Trimble: Yeah, it’s exciting. Let’s start with a little bit of levity. I contend that in the US, in episodic television, most people would say The Wire, Sopranos, and Mad Men. It was a great series, a great show. Don and his character really seared into the cultural zeitgeist.

Tell us a little bit about the Canadian Don Draper. Is it the looks? Are you able to do Don’s sardonic wit so much? Give us some background there.

Anthony Gindin: I was an agency new business guy for many years. I did some really big pitches around the world. That actually originated at a big pitch we were doing in Switzerland. There was a bunch of CEOs that had flown in from all the different countries. It was a massive $6 billion client that had a presence in 42 countries and all the CEOs were there.

After the pitch, the CEO from Brazil came over and is this big guy. He grabbed me around the neck, and he said to me, “I like that. You’re like a Canadian Don Draper.” It was a joke at the time, and we laughed.

Then I was at another pitch. This one was for Eli Lilly, which is one of the largest pharmaceutical brands in the US. When I got the call, that was actually a rejection call. But the head of global procurement said to me, she said that was actually one of the best pitches I’ve ever seen. She goes, “We were joking after that, you’re like a Canadian Don Draper.” I thought to myself, really? Twice.

Then there was a third time later where a client said that. I actually can’t really say what it is, but it kept coming up and then it became a bit of a joke and a hashtag around the office. At one point we made some funny videos about it making fun of me walking around the office with a glass of scotch and a cigarette, that kind of thing. It just became a bit of a joke.

Brent Trimble: That’s fantastic. That connotes a slightly kinder and friendlier Don Draper, the Canadian version. We’re excited to talk today a little bit, and we’ve had a series of guests. Of course, everyone can go back and look, and folks who are really energized and excited about reinventing the agency model, everything from pricing to productization to reinventing the model itself.

Of course, there’s been a lot of talk in the industry for years about that. It seems like we’re at that tipping point. You and I met at an agency conference, which is very vibrant and lots of collaboration there.

But give us and our listeners the start, the provenance of how you began Agency Different and why.

Anthony Gindin: First, to provide a bit of background, I’ve been in the agency world for 23 years. I started my first agency when I was 17 years old. If you go back even before then, when I was about seven years old, I used to be glued to the television only because I wanted to watch the commercials–that’s all I really cared about. I was fascinated by how many commercials were so terrible.

What I used to do is I would sit there, and I’d pick a commercial, and then I would go rewrite the whole concept of the commercial, and I would pitch it to my mom. She would sit there and give me a thumbs up or thumbs down as to whether she thought it was an improvement on the original commercial. I’ve been very passionate about advertising since I was very young.

As I said, I started my first agency when I was 17. By the time I was 24, I had already grown and sold two agencies. I then had a long stint on the client side. I also worked at some large agencies. I was an agency new business guy.

Fast forward to today, I left agency new business, went out on my own. My first consulting business was called Futurecraft. But I later decided why am I not as niche and as focused as I should be on the thing that I’m really passionate about, which is growing agencies? I rebranded that to Agency Different. I just love working with agency principals.

I’ve been in and around the agency situation from every possible angle, from starting an agency, growing it, selling it, working at large agencies, being an agency new business guy. I also spent nine years as a client, partially living in Europe where I wrote countless RFPs. I was pitched to by probably hundreds of agencies. I worked with Ogilvy and BBDO.

I took all of those various angles and really brought them together into my current coaching practice where I work with agency principals to really help them step back, rethink what the future looks like, reinvent their business model, and get on a trajectory for consistent, steady, and most importantly, profitable growth.

Brent Trimble: That’s key. We work with a lot of shops and firms too, and I always had that question around economic orientation. Are you oriented to profit or not? People think, well, of course, would a business not want to be profitable? There is real purpose, precision, and focus required for profitability. I want to come back to that.

But we’re recording today, and this is July, and it’s 2024. It’s been a dynamic news cycle here in the United States and globally. In the midst of that, though, we’re now at a point where the pandemic is a bit in the rearview mirror. But through that time, we’ve been through some boom-bust cycles in the services industry and not just agencies, the big management consulting firms over hiring potentially in the pandemic, shedding services, clients retrenching a little bit on their spends.

We like to ask guests on the show just who are out in the market and engaging with firms and principals, what are you seeing? We’re seeing and hearing a little bit of a backstop emerging, maybe some tender green shoots, to coin a phrase from a United States presidential campaign years ago, beginning to emerge. There’s been some Bureau of Labor Statistics data here in the U.S that seems to say that the services businesses are stabilizing, or maybe not, in an aggressive hiring mode, but at least some stabilization.

Ad Age has some articles about folks spinning off, starting shops. Is the sentiment that at least the worst has passed for now? Is it still cautious? Extemporaneously, what are you hearing from agency principals you’re working with?

Anthony Gindin: It’s an interesting one. I would agree. We’ve come off a very volatile and confusing period in our history, a lot of economic ups and downs. I think we’ve reached a point where things have stabilized enough, but we still don’t really know what’s going to happen next.

There was a lot of concern about client budgets shrinking, which did happen for sure. I think that was across most industries. I think now that maybe has stabilized and we’re hoping to see the bounce back. I think it’s industry by industry. It’s happening in some industries. The obvious ones like financial, health care, tech, those ones are doing fine. They’re bouncing back. No problem. Some of the less significant industries are a bit slower to bounce back.

But I think agencies are in an interesting spot where a lot of them have had to reduce staff during this period. They’re hesitant to hire up. Even as client budgets bounce back, they’re still on the fence. They don’t know what’s going to happen.

I would say this upcoming U.S. election is going to have a significant impact on what happens from a US and global economy perspective, and I think a lot of people are aware of that. I feel like generally speaking, Brent, a bit of a holding pattern where things are starting to come back. But I think until we get past this US election, I think nobody really knows what’s going to happen.

Brent Trimble: Good point. All this dynamism is in a business that is always that way. There’s always fluctuations and volatility, but here in the past couple of years, probably more than usual for sure. That’s a good perspective on maybe at least some nascent stabilization, but some wait and see as we reach the, thankfully, nearing the end in sight in another election cycle.

Anthony Gindin: There’s one thing I can add to that, too, which might be of value. It’s interesting because obviously, I’ve been coaching and consulting with agencies for years, but when Covid hit, I actually sidestepped because I saw the boom that was happening in e-commerce. I actually sidestepped and went and co-founded two e-commerce companies. I tempered it down for a bit there. Those were the two companies that went public.

I think it’s interesting. There was a boom in e-commerce. It’s funny because I’ve worked with a lot of agencies and a lot of the agencies that have really seen things go in the opposite direction are the ones that are working with online e-commerce, D2C brands.

Brent Trimble: Yes, riding that boom of digitalization and e-commerce, it really was fueled during that time. We discussed your pivot from working in the industry to rebranding your practice called Agency Different. At the bottom of the episode, we’ll, of course, give you an opportunity to give us the locations where folks can find you and talk about the book and so forth.

But you work and speak with many agency leaders, I’m going to presume of different size, dimensions, firm types, specialties and so forth. But from all those conversations, whether they’re clients, whether they’re prospects, you’re giving somebody some free advice at a conference, if you had to pull out the top three challenges that are most common in the agencies that you see and work with, how would you list those? How would you quantify those? What would they be?

Anthony Gindin: This leans into why I called my practice Agency Different because the number one problem that I see across all agencies, and this is a problem I had identified as far back as 10, 15 years ago when I was a client working with all these agencies, is that when you go to research agencies as a client, you get lost in a sea of agencies that are basically all saying the same thing, just with different brands and different colors and different messaging. But really, there’s an extreme lack of differentiation.

I like to say that all agencies are truly unique on the inside, and I know that from going in and working with these agencies. They all have their own unique, special thing. Whereas on the outside, they all tend to appear to be almost identical. It’s also interesting that agencies are so good at working with brands to help them stand out and help them differentiate, but they often fail to do so for themselves. So, number one, a lack of differentiation among agencies, a lack of having the courage to really do something different and stand out.

I think that then leans into the other two key problems, which number two would be a lack of market specificity, just not really finding the courage to focus on a more specific market and really own it and lean into it due to a fear of excluding others or closing the door on other potential high paying clients. Lack of differentiation, lack of market specificity, which is a big differentiating factor.

Then the third one is the lack of unique perspectives, unique controversial ideas and perspectives, within that differentiated positioning, within that market specificity, where they can then go one layer deeper and have some really unique, controversial perspectives that they bring to the table. I would think those are the three biggest problems for almost all agencies.

Brent Trimble: That’s great, and that notion of just a client seeking a strategic marketing partner, to your point, website, collateral, whatever artifact that they encounter about an agency, they seem to be swimming in a sea of sameness. That’s really key.

You’ve written a couple of books. The one we have today, and I’ve got here, is your second book, and it’s called The Agency Secret. It’s around the notion of systematizing repeatable growth. This is a great theme, and we’re fortunate here on the podcast to have, I think our third or fourth author this year, which is fantastic, because we like to promote deeper thinking with our listeners and give them some resources to go and find.

We’ve had Tim Williams who talks a lot about value, Michael Farmer, of course, who wrote the Madison Avenue Makeover, which is the second installment of Madison Avenue Manslaughter, great author. Your book is really around this notion of growth. You’re talking about leadership. You’ve got some repeatable levers that you’ve trademarked, client perspective, positioning, then culminating in this notion of systematized growth.

We had Caroline Johnson on recently from The Business Model Company, and she’s in this camp of really blow up that business model and completely rethink and then reinvent. In your estimation in your book, and we encourage listeners to go out and grab The Agency Secret, how do we go about systematizing? What are the fundamental business models that need to be completely rethought with those underpinnings? How do you approach that challenge?

Anthony Gindin: There are many layers to how you approach that. But I think if you boil it down, you have to start by having a certain mindset as a leader. That mindset is that the world we live in today, things are changing and evolving so quickly. Yes, you need to be able to blow up your business model and put it back together again, but you also need to live in a constant state of reinvention. We’re no longer in this place where you can wait seven, eight, nine years and then go through some big process to reposition your brand. You need to be more on an annual level, constantly thinking through what that transformation looks like and having a framework and having systems so that you’re constantly transforming and evolving with the times.

At the core, you need to be in that mindset. You need to be in what I call recurring transformation, where it’s a nonstop thing. The second problem that relates to that is incrementalism. There’s a great quote from Nicholas Negroponte. He says, “Incrementalism is innovation’s worst enemy.” Essentially, the way most companies approach change is incrementally picking two or three big things they’re going to do each year, a new website, new accounting software, etc. They maybe complete two out of three at the end of the year, and then they add another one next year and they just keep going. They never actually get where they’re going. It’s like running on a hamster wheel.

At some point, you have to take a step back, blow everything up, as you mentioned Caroline Johnson saying, blow everything up, be willing to take a clean slate approach and put it back together in the right way. Once you’ve done that once, then you need to transition into a constant state of recurring transformation. You need to have quarterly processes, annual processes. If you change your brand position twice in a year, good. It’s a willingness to be a more fluid, evolving company. I don’t think many brands have gotten there yet mentally to match and mirror the pace of change in the world around them.

Now, that’s at the core. Once you go beyond that, obviously there’s a lot of other layers to how you systemize growth. I think essentially most agencies, if you think of it from a new business perspective, do too much. They’re just spray and pray, trying all these different channels and tactics. They get clients coming in from all sorts of different places. It’s all over the place and a bit random. That’s what I see in almost every agency I talk to.

My methodology there is really wipe the slate clean, trim it back down, figure out the one channel, the one tactic that’s going to work, that’s going to get you consistent, qualified meetings with the right people, make that work, figure it out. Once that’s thriving, if you want to add a second channel, a second tactic on top, do that. Go one by one and only do things that work. Cut out all the rest of the crap.

Brent Trimble: That’s fantastic. In this and then in the book, there are lots of notions of value systematizing, repeatable growth which connotes or building enterprise value as an agency. More profitability leads to great enterprise value. Value for your clients leads to value for the firm.

How should agencies think about elevating their perceived value that then leads to actual enterprise value for them? I’d love to hear your take on that. We’ve had a nice variety of thought leaders speak to this, but it’d be great to hear your take.

Anthony Gindin: If I were to break down my core philosophy and what I do with agencies, it’s really about engineering value. To understand how to engineer value, you have to look at perceived value first because perceived value is incredibly personal. It completely depends on who you’re talking to, what their problems are, what their world looks like, what matters to them. Perceived value is that individual person’s perception of your value, so it’s incredibly personal, and it depends on who you’re talking to.

When an agency is looking to re-engineer their value, they have to consider perceived value. The first step towards elevating your perceived value is speaking to a more specific market, and I said that before, so really getting more intentional about that market specificity, how you define that market, how you label that market that you target, and how you overtly communicate that externally so that when you talk to those people, they view you as having a higher perceived value because you’re speaking to them directly.

The second layer to that is understanding the key results those people are looking for and speaking to those key results again, overtly in your external brand positioning and messaging. So, make it specific to them and their market, and the perceived value goes up. Speak to the results they desire most, and the perceived value goes up a little bit more.

The third and perhaps most important piece is what unique methods, what unique and differentiated offerings are you bringing to the table beyond just the basic agency services that achieve those results for that specific market? That’s really where we get into the productization layer where you’re speaking to a specific market, you understand the key results that they desire, now let’s create and productize some unique and differentiated offerings to achieve those results for that market. That’s really how agencies, in my opinion, need to look at engineering their value.

Brent Trimble: That’s great. Going back to a few of the points, but this notion of specificity in a specific client vertical, having that level of qualification, maybe perception, by the client that you’re an expert in that space, that category, that vertical because ultimately then the value is you’re selling expertise, critical thinking, insights, not simply outputs. That’s really good. You’ve been extremely a great soldier here as we’re recording in July and you’ve unfortunately been hit by the summer Covid wave, so we appreciate it, and your voice and clarity has come through.

Anthony Gindin: Yes, and excuse the coughing.

Brent Trimble: No, absolutely, we appreciate you soldiering through it. I’m trying to figure out how we could tie in a Don Draper and Mad Men “what would Don have thought of AI” hook here. Although, we can let the imagination run wild and say that Don might have looked at AI and said, “I don’t think of you at all.”

But everyone’s talking about AI, and it’s hit some frothy peaks. I think there’s been some good, more cerebral, thoughtful notions about it lately, maybe retrenching a little bit from the hype cycle.

When we look at AI, and I look at AI, and certainly anyone who’s been exposed or had some work in the biddable media side of things, the algorithmic side of things, we’ve been working in these AI type channels for quite some time. It has profound implications to the agency business simply because when a lot of a business model is built on lots of adaptations of lots of different artifacts like content, copy, images, you can look at that and say, “Wow, there’s a natural fit here.”

There are many other areas we could go to with AI in the agency space, but I think that’s where it started to hit first. You saw some from adaptation, from image versioning and then going back years with, even with the early days of RankBrain within Google, it’s been with us.

But here in this summer pre-election, you’re talking to agency clients all the time, principals. How are they absorbing AI? How are you counseling them in an approach to maybe, of course, reinvent, I think you talked about quite a bit, stay abreast of things, but then impact value for the future?

Anthony Gindin: That’s something I do have a very clear perspective on. I like to say, and I just put out an email newsletter about this about a month ago, that AI will never be your differentiator. It’s a bit of a contrarian viewpoint, but basically what I think happened is we went from hearing about AI for years, but nothing really happening. Then someone tells you, “Oh, you got to try this thing called ChatGPT.” You use it once and you’re just blown away completely.

ChatGPT is the fastest adopted consumer application of all time. It far exceeds TikTok or anything else. It basically happened at light speed. So, then what happened is almost every company on earth was suddenly saying on their website that they’re powered by AI in some way, shape or form, even though in most cases it was just marketing bullshit really. They weren’t even actually using AI to do anything.

It became so ubiquitous so quickly that it’s now at a point where nobody really cares, nobody even really believes it. Everyone just says they’re doing AI and using AI, and it’s just AI, AI, it doesn’t really mean much. I think that happened so incredibly fast that for an agency now to be putting AI front and center as a part of their positioning or their service offerings I think is comparable to saying we use the internet, or we use electricity in our office etc. It’s incredible how quickly that happened.

What I coach agencies to do is if you don’t master AI, you’re going to die, so it’s incredibly important. Just quietly master it and use it to make everything you do faster, better and more profitable. But unless you’re going to go build some SaaS platform or some amazingly innovative AI tool, just stay quiet about it and just use it to make your business faster, better and more profitable.

But what you need to do is productize and lean into your strategic services and your human-led services so that you can stand above the machines.

Brent Trimble: That’s great advice. It’s interesting, I think the conference you and I attended in New York, I was on a panel. We were talking about usage in agencies in various stages of adoption, quite a bit of adoption, frankly, but some taking your advice and saying we’re really using it to make mundane tasks easier. We’re using it to get faster in some repeatable things where it makes sense.

A lot of agencies use lots of different technologies, so they’re pretty astute with how to adopt them and so forth, saying we understand it’s only as useful as how structured your data is, for instance. Those are some great insights and some great advice for our listeners.

Two things, first of all, where listeners can buy the book and then alternately where they can find you in the consulting practice, so give us those elements, and then we’ll close out.

Anthony Gindin: Sure. First of all, you can just go to theagencysecret.com to grab a copy of the book. I tried to make that as easy to remember as possible, so theagencysecret.com.

As far as my broader world and my consulting practice, you can just go to anthonygindin.com, that’s G-I-N-D-I-N.com, and that should give you access to all of my consulting practice and offerings. You can learn a bit more about me and my background there.

I think those are really the two primary spots, theagencysecret.com and anthonygindin.com.

Brent Trimble: That’s fantastic. To our listeners, thank you for tuning in. If you have any follow-up questions for myself or Anthony, please reach out. We have a special little Easter egg at the end of the episode. If you would like a free copy of the book, we’ve acquired some on your behalf. Shoot us an email at podcast@kantata.com. The first five requests will get a copy courtesy of the podcast. Again, that’s podcast@kantata.com.

Anthony, it’s been great. Thank you so much, particularly for coming on as you’re convalescing from Covid. And for our listeners, thanks for listening.

Anthony Gindin: Thank you.

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