Agency Leadership Podcast

Chip Griffin and Gini Dietrich
  • 4.8 (19)
  • Management
  • Updated Weekly

Chip Griffin and Gini Dietrich help PR and marketing agency owners make better decisions about the businesses they run. With 300+ episodes, the Agency Leadership Podcast covers the topics owners deal with every week: pricing, profitability, hiring, client management, positioning, and what it takes to build an agency worth owning. Chip is the founder of SAGA Agency Growth Advisors and creator of the Build to Own approach. Gini is the founder of Spin Sucks and creator of the PESO Model. 

  1. 4d ago

    Using AI to extend your agency’s PESO Model expertise

    Most owner-led agencies know they should be doing more than media relations. One barrier has always been capability: you can’t execute paid media if nobody on your team knows paid media. AI is removing that barrier, and Chip and Gini dig into exactly how. Gini built a PESO model operating system AI that prompts you instead of you prompting it. Many agencies are strong in one or two media types and need scaffolding to think through the rest. The tool can be used to help agencies execute unfamiliar disciplines step by step. Chip frames this as an opportunity to do things that were theoretically possible two years ago but practically out of reach. A paid campaign to amplify a blog post no longer requires hiring a specialist. Beyond drafting, both hosts made a case for AI as a learning tool instead of merely a content machine. Gini tested this directly by vibe-coding a PESO model diagnostic, working through multiple versions with AI troubleshooting each step. The practical upshot is that you can use AI to build separate knowledge-rich agents for each media type, loaded with client messaging and context, and treat them as thought partners for areas where your team lacks depth. It won’t eliminate the need for people or strategic thinking, but capability is no longer a credible excuse for staying stuck at one letter of PESO. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “AI is a great opportunity for all of the things that you wished you could have done two years ago that now become much more feasible for you to do without having to go out and bring in-house new expertise.” Gini Dietrich: “I have built my entire organization using agents. It doesn’t replace anybody. I still need people to do the work, and I still need people to do the strategic thinking, and I still need people to service the client work. It makes us smarter, it makes us faster, it makes us more productive, but it doesn’t replace anyone.” Chip Griffin: “It doesn’t have to do it for you, it can help educate you… You can make it tell you at whatever level of knowledge you need in order to become comfortable with it, and then you actually start to learn it.” Gini Dietrich: “If you don’t have shared or owned and paid expertise internally, you can use those agents to help you build those things.” Related The PESO Model evolves for the AI era (and why your website isn’t dead) Has the PESO Model become a necessity for modern agencies? Agencies need the PESO model now more than ever How to allocate your client’s PESO budget View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. Chip Griffin: Hello, and welcome to the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And Gini, I think we’re gonna let AI do our jobs today. I know we don’t ever talk about AI on this show. Gini Dietrich: We don’t. We don’t like it at all. Chip Griffin: But I think AI is gonna let us do so much more here. Awesome. Maybe even, maybe we can even implement the PESO model as part of the show. Gini Dietrich: Beautiful. Let’s do it. Chip Griffin: I’ve, I’ve heard that the PESO model is something that’s really important that we should- … we should focus on. So why not let AI help us with it? Gini Dietrich: Oh, I love it. Maybe we could use NotebookLM and have it create its, our voices too. We’ll just be done. We don’t have to do anything. Chip Griffin: That’s a great idea. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, let’s do it. Chip Griffin: So then, you and I could just connect and just do our gossiping and chit-chat. Gini Dietrich: Right. Yes. Chip Griffin: And we’d still get an episode even without having to take the time to record. Gini Dietrich: Yes. I like it. Let’s do it. Chip Griffin: I like it. I like that. That would be- That would be fun. Gini Dietrich: We don’t gossip. What do you mean? Chip Griffin: Gossip, talk about world events. Whatever, however you want. I mean- Gini Dietrich: Yes. It’s kind of good that those aren’t recorded. Ah. Chip Griffin: It is. I suspect we would get a lot of listeners, but we’d lose a lot at the same time, so. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Chip Griffin: In any event, we are going to talk about AI again because it is top of mind for all of us, and so we all ought to be thinking about it. And we are gonna talk about the PESO model because we just happen to have somebody here who knows a little bit about the PESO model. So let me explain it to you… Oh, no, I didn’t. Oh. I wasn’t talking about me. With the founder of the PESO model as one of the co-hosts. It, we’ve talked about the PESO model before, but I think, you know, one of the things that, that has occurred to me in recent times, and I’m sure it has occurred to you as well, is that AI can help more PR agencies go deeper into the PESO model, particularly in areas where they maybe don’t have as much in-house expertise. And, and one- Yep … of the things we’ve talked about with agencies a lot is that the PESO model touches a lot of different things, and it’s difficult for any small agency to have all of the skillsets needed to fully execute PESO properly. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Yeah. Chip Griffin: AI seems to open the door to more of that. Gini Dietrich: For sure, it does. One of the things that we did late last year is I built a PESO operating system AI. And instead of you prompting it, it prompts you. So it’s built to do exactly that, so that you can say, “Okay, well, we’re really good at media relations, but we don’t have any expertise in shared, owned, or paid,” or, “We’re really great at owned and shared, but we don’t have any expertise in earned and paid.” Whatever it happens to be, right? And so it will h- it will prompt you with questions to help you think through, “Okay, if we’re great at owned and shared, but we don’t have the E and the P, here are the things you need to be thinking about.” And it will help you either figure out how to execute it on your own with step-by-step instructions, or it will give you a creative brief that then you could hand off to a partner. So it, it’s built to do that, but the point is, is that- I mean, would I prefer you use the PESO OS AI that I built? For sure, but really any AI could do that. I think if you,you have to prompt it. It’s not gonna prompt you. But I think any AI based on information that’s out there in the, on the web that we’ve created around PESO, it will be able to take all of that and say, “Here are some things you should be thinking about.” And I think it’s really good at helping you think through things that you’re just not an expert at. And it’s really good at helping you think through, gosh, we should be using paid to amplify our content, for instance, but I don’t have any idea. Do– should I do it on LinkedIn? Should I do it on Instagram? Should I do it on TikTok? Should I do it on Google? Like, I have no idea. So AI is a really good thought partner from that perspective. Chip Griffin: Well, and I think that’s the, that’s the key point is that it allows you to, certainly you can look at it in, at a 30,000-foot level, you know, with your specialized OS that allows you to really think the whole big picture through. Yep. But you can also use it in a very granular way to say “Hey, look, I know I want to amplify this content. Let’s, let’s look at the various ways that we can do it, and help educate me about how we do that most effectively.” Yep. And, you know, to me, AI is a great opportunity for all of the things that you wished you could have done two years ago Gini Dietrich: Yeah Chip Griffin: That now become much more feasible for you to do without having to go out and bring in-house new expertise, or hiring someone if it’s, particularly when it’s focused, right? If it, it really is just, “I need a paid campaign to amplify this blog post.” That is a whole lot easier to do with AI, frankly, than it is to go hire somebody in-house- Yeah … and a lot cheaper. Gini Dietrich: Absolutely, yes. And it will give you the step-by, literal step-by-step instructions if you wanna do it yourself. Right. And if you don’t wanna do it yourself, you say, “Help me create a project brief or a creative brief that will, that I can hand off to a partner,” and it does that for you too. So one of the things that we do is, you know, I have a paid media expert in, on our marketing team, but then we hire out, depending on what we need, we’ll hire out sort of the day-to-day minutia piece of it. ‘Cause, you know, especially in paid media, you have to be in there every day and testing and tweaking and all that kind of stuff. And AI’s great at saying, “Eh, pay attention to this,” but not great at actually pushing the buttons. And so it has helped our paid media team even just outsource some of that stuff too. So it’s, I think it’s really great from that perspective. You know, it’s still, you, like, I think some, especially PR professionals, are using it for, like, list development and media pitching and things like that, which is fine, but it’s still not… it’s still a good first draft. You still have to add your personalization. You still have to do those kinds of things. One of the things that we were kind of struggling with, actually not struggling with, we were arguing over internally, was our outbound sales campaigns and what those said. And I felt like they were way too long. Our chief revenue officer felt like the calls to action weren’t right, and so we put it into AI, and we were like, “This is where we’re struggling. We’re not agreeing on these five points.” And it pumped out some stuff

    21 min

  2. May 28

    What to do when a client “fires” your agency

    Losing a client is never fun, even when you saw the writing on the wall. The only question is how you choose to handle it. In this episode, Chip and Gini cover the practical and emotional side of client departures, from the moment you get the news to the lessons you take away. Gini points out that there are plenty of reasons a client could terminate the relationship, which may have nothing to do with your work. Strategy changes, budget cuts, and leadership turnover all end client relationships that were otherwise going fine. Chip’s advice is to not react immediately. Ask for a couple of days to review the agreement and put together a transition plan. That space lets you get the emotion out before you say something you’ll regret. Once you have your bearings, focus on making the exit clean. Read your actual contract, confirm the notice terms, and hand over everything the client needs: documents, passwords, contacts, work in progress. Chip is blunt about agencies that fight clients on the way out — it accomplishes nothing and just guarantees a bad final impression. Don’t burn any bridges and you just might see those clients come back or send you referrals. Finally, be honest with your team about what the loss means for the business. If there are financial implications, say so before people start drawing their own conclusions. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “You never want to react immediately to the news in such a way that you perhaps compound a difficult situation, or at the very least you don’t make it as easy as it should be.” Gini Dietrich: “I always say that you’re remembered by how you left an organization versus the work that you did. And so you never want to burn a bridge, even if you’re caught by surprise, even if you wanted to fire the client and you’re happy about it.” Chip Griffin: “If the client is coming to you and canceling because they’re having financial issues, you’re probably not going to get the money anyway. So rather than fighting for something that probably isn’t there, why don’t you try to make it as painless as possible and get whatever you can so that you’ve built some goodwill potentially for the future?” Gini Dietrich: “Be honest and open with your team because I think they will come with solutions that you may not have thought of or that you may have assumed they’re not willing to do.” Related Why do agencies lose clients? Agency client cancellation policies Agency owners need to put themselves in other people’s shoes How to protect yourself from an unexpected client breakup View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. 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 Gini, as a famous American once said, “You’re fired.” Gini Dietrich: Oh, no. Chip Griffin: Okay. Maybe … pack your knives and go. Um- Oh … what would you like to go with instead? Gini Dietrich: Yeah, let’s, maybe we’ll do that one. I like that. Chip Griffin: Pack your knives and go. Top Chef is a great show. Gini Dietrich: I love Top Chef. Chip Griffin: Not as good as it was in the early days, but- Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I agree. Yeah … Chip Griffin: it’s still, it’s still kind of fun occasionally, and I, I still- Yeah … do watch part of each season. Yeah. From Restaurant Wars on. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I did love, I did love a little Top Chef. I agree. Chip Griffin:  Jen and one of my kids watch it up until Restaurant Wars, then they let me know, and I come in and I watch Restaurant Wars through the end. Gini Dietrich: That’s funny. They’re like, “Okay, your turn.” Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, that’s where it starts to get interesting, so. Gini Dietrich: That’s funny. Yeah. Chip Griffin: Anyway, no, we are gonna talk about getting fired. Not fired as an owner. We’re, we’re not at that point yet. We don’t have boards that are gonna fire us, most of us at least. Gini Dietrich: Right, right. Chip Griffin: But clients do fire us from time to time, and we’ve had conversations in the past about firing clients ourselves and, and those sorts of things. But, what happens, what do you do when a client calls you up or, worse, sends you an email and says, “We’re done. We’re out”? Yeah, you know, it’s- What are things you should be thinking about at that point? Gini Dietrich: I think so. The, I think there’s a couple of things here. One is that the word, using the word “fired” makes it sound so bad. Sometimes it’s because there’s been a strategy change, there’s been a budget reallocation, maybe leadership has changed, maybe there’s a new VP of marketing or a CCO. Like, there are lots of reasons, right, that have nothing to do with you or the agency or your work. And so saying that you got fired is, I, I just don’t like that term. Now that I have that off my chest, I’ll step down off my soapbox and say, like, there, I think we should always be prepared for the eventual loss of a client. And because we don’t know, right? We don’t- Uh-huh … we can kind of guess, you know, if there are big changes at a leadership level, or if there’s been a reorg, or if the company has sold or things like that, we can guess. Like, we’re probably not gonna be working with that client much longer. We could also sort of read the tea leaves from the perspective of they’ve been ghosting us, and we haven’t been able to get any work done. They’ve been declining meetings or not showing up for meetings. Like, there are lots of reasons that you can kind of read those tea leaves. And so I always think it’s, it’s really good to be prepared. It should never come as a surprise when you lose a client, and you should be prepared. You should have, you should know what you’re going to say, you should know how, what a transition looks like, and you should have a full pipeline that will replace that client fairly quickly, even in a chaotic world that we’re living in right now, so that you’re not caught off guard. Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, I think the, you know, the first step when you get this news is, probably 95% of the time you’re gonna be annoyed, upset, unhappy. Gini Dietrich: Sure. Absolutely. Chip Griffin: Some negative emotion. A small percentage of the time you’ll be like, “Oh, thank God, I just- … I, I really wanted to get rid of them anyway.” Yeah. You know? So. Gini Dietrich: Blessing in disguise, yep. Right. Chip Griffin: So, so sometimes that’ll be your reaction, but most of the time it’s not gonna be a happy reaction that you have. And so I think the, the first thing is to just, whether it’s on a call with them or you get it by email or, you know, carrier pigeon or whatever, take a deep breath. Yes. Right? Yes … you, you don’t ever want to react immediately to the news in such a way that you perhaps compound a difficult situation, or at the very least you don’t make it as easy as it could or should be. And I think your advice to, to be prepared for this, certainly if you see the signs on the wall you need to be even more prepared. But sometimes these things are, you know, in retrospect they won’t be a surprise, but you might feel surprised in the moment because you didn’t pick up on all of the little signals along the way and, and that then becomes a learning experience. And I think that’s… to me, that’s one of the most valuable things when you lose a client for whatever reason, is taking advantage of that to learn for the future. Learn the signs to look for. Yep. Learn what you could do differently potentially to maintain the relationship, retain the client. Learn to target better ideal clients, whatever it is. But I, I always like to turn these things into a learning experience as much as possible. But you also have the logistics to actually handle the end of the client relationship, so why don’t we talk about that for a little bit. What, you know, it, it’s not just about the learnings that you can take for the future, it’s how do you handle that immediately? How do you transition the client out? Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I think, you know, I always say that you’re always remembered by how you left an organization versus the work that you did. And so you never wanna burn a bridge, even if you’re caught by surprise, even if you wanted to fire the client and you’re happy about it, you should never burn a bridge because you just never know, right? So understanding what contract they signed and what the terms of agreement are, you know? We had a situation where I was working with a girlfriend and, she lost a big, big, big, big client. It came out of the blue, that she was not expecting it because she’d had a conversation a week prior that everything was fine. And so she works with several contractors, and we had to say like, “We’re really sorry. We know that we thought you were gonna be doing work in May and June,” and, like, we go, “The client’s gone.” So, and she had one person come back to her and say, like, “We have a 30-day agreement,” blah, blah, blah. They didn’t have a 30-day agreement, but in her mind they had a 30-day agreement. Sure. In the paperwork, there was no 30-day agreement. So I use that as an example because in your mind you may have a 30 or 60 or 90-day termination clause that may not have made it to the final piece. Maybe you have it for some clients and not others. Like, you have to really do your research to, and go back and read the executed agreement so you know what those terms are. And then spend that time ensuring that there’s a seamles

    24 min

  3. May 21

    What the Agency AI Survey results mean for PR and marketing firms

    The SAGA Agency AI Survey results are in, and small agency owners are feeling great about AI. Maybe too great. In this episode, Chip and Gini dig into the numbers and find the gap between how owners think they’re using AI and the reality of what’s happening inside their businesses. The headline figures look impressive: 89% of respondents report regular or widespread AI use, 74% use it daily, and 88% say they’ve seen productivity gains. But Chip isn’t buying it. He questions whether the sample skews toward early adopters, or more likely, whether agency owners simply don’t have a clear enough picture of what “good” AI use looks like elsewhere. When 53% say they’re ahead of their peers but only 13% say they’re behind, the math doesn’t work. As Gini puts it, they’re probably grading themselves on usage habits, not operational depth. Next, Chip and Gini look at what agencies are actually doing with AI. Most activity falls squarely into what Chip calls “generative AI 101” — drafting emails, writing social posts, generating blog content. The more interesting stuff is largely absent. AI-assisted design work barely registers. Only 74% are even using AI to revise or edit content, a number both hosts find inexplicable given how easy and useful that is. Gini’s own example of running an article through an AP style agent before sending it to a notoriously precise editor at PR Daily illustrates exactly the kind of practical, low-friction habit that should be universal by now. Another data point they discuss is the disconnect between productivity gains and revenue. Agencies report getting faster, but their top-line numbers are flat or down. Gini’s read is that AI efficiency is getting absorbed into existing scope rather than converted into new value. Agencies are over-servicing clients at the same fees, filling freed time with more of the same work instead of building something new. On the pricing side, almost no one reported clients pushing for discounts tied to AI use. Instead of a reduction in cost, the larger enterprise clients are asking about data governance, usage policies, and procurement compliance. Chip advises unless your agency has the infrastructure to manage those requirements consistently, that’s a market best left to someone else. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “There’s nothing in this data that suggests that there is widespread innovative use of it, widespread use of it for internal operations or for business development or any of those things.” Gini Dietrich: “AI is being absorbed into the existing scope. There’s silent commoditization so that clients are getting more for the same fees.” Chip Griffin: “Now is the time to experiment and figure out what works and what doesn’t when the cost of failure is much lower.” Gini Dietrich: “I don’t believe that AI is going to replace us. I believe that people who know how to use AI effectively are what’s going to replace you.” Resources Survey shows most owner-led agencies think they’re ahead on AI. Most aren’t. Related How agency owners can use AI as an always-on thought partner How AI impacts PR agencies and solos (featuring Karen Swim and Michelle Kane) Focus on AI value, not cost View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. 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 Gini, as, as we sit here on a Monday and record this, I am truly optimistic. I have published my planned photo schedule for the evenings this week, and despite the fact that- … it says it’s gonna rain Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, I still have games on that calendar, and I am optimistic that we will actually get those games in even though they don’t generally play baseball and softball in the rain. Gini Dietrich: I don’t know if that’s optimistic or masochistic. Chip Griffin: Oh. No, masochistic would be they were lacrosse games and I know they’re gonna be played in the rain, and I’m still looking forward to getting  wet while I take the photos. Gini Dietrich: And you’re still looking forward to it. Chip Griffin: No, I suspect if the forecast is what it is, I think it is highly unlikely that any of those games will be played. Gini Dietrich: Well, good, then you can be optimistic that you don’t have to go and shoot photos. Chip Griffin: There you go. Yeah. I can be optimistic to have some, some evenings to catch up on, on real work instead of- Gini Dietrich: That’s right. That’s right … Chip Griffin: photography. But- That’s right … optimism is kind of the theme of the day here though, because we have recently completed the SAGA Agency AI Survey, and it, it turns out that agency owners, to nobody’s surprise, are eternally optimistic, and they are astoundingly optimistic about AI, and how they’re using it and what it means for their businesses. Gini Dietrich: Yes, indeed. So I looked at the results, and that is my takeaway as well, is that they’re extremely optimistic. 89% have regular or widespread use, 74% use it every day, 89% expect AI use to grow over the next 12 months. And so, yes, it is very optimistic. 88% report productivity gains, and 79% report quality gains. Chip Griffin: It is amazing how much work AI is doing for agencies today. It is, it is frankly unbelievable, and I mean that literally. Gini Dietrich: Literally, yes. Chip Griffin: I do not believe it. Yeah. I have either stumbled across a sample of the earliest adopters who are most interested in AI and have really taken it the furthest, or more likely, people don’t really understand what’s out there and so therefore think they are further ahead than they are. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I think it’s… Well, I mean, I will, I will say that the head of, the ahead of peers piece of it, so the data said that 53% believe that they’re somewhat or further ahead than their peers, and only 13% think they’re behind. That’s mathematically impossible. And so I think my take on it, and I’d love your take as well, is that they’re grading themselves on their usage and not on the operational depth of it. So for instance, they’re using ChatGPT every day as a habit, but they’re not operationalizing AI as a business model, and I think that 53% are confusing the two. Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, I, I think it’s probably a multitude of factors. I think part of it is that agency owners visualize a very low bar for their peers when it comes to AI. Gini Dietrich: Okay. Chip Griffin: And I, I think part of that is that people aren’t hearing a lot of examples of how agency, other agencies are using- Gini Dietrich: Sure … Chip Griffin: AI. They’re not as active as some of us may be in going out and seeing how other industries, similar industries are using AI and really testing the limits and understanding what’s possible. So I think part of it is that they don’t have an appropriate baseline to know whether they are indeed ahead or not because they’ve set the bar so low in their own minds. And I think that part of it is, you know, this point that if they’re just using it at all, they think that puts them ahead. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think that that’s what’s going on. I think that they’re, that they’re saying, “Well yeah, I use it every day.” And that’s, and that’s what makes them think that they’re ahead. Chip Griffin: Right. But I, I think as we dig in deeper and we look at how they’re actually using it, it’s pretty obvious that, that most of the usage by these owners is what I would call generative AI 101. Draft me an email. Yep. Help me create a blog post or a social post. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: It is– There’s nothing in this data that suggests that there is widespread innovative use of it, widespread use of it for internal operations or for business development or any of those things. It really appears to be sort of the basics, sort of the things that people were talking about a year or two ago in terms of generative AI, and that seems to be where most of the activity and most of the stated value is. But even in those areas, there’s a good swath of agencies that aren’t even doing that. Gini Dietrich: Right. Chip Griffin: I think the, if I recall correctly, the number was only like 74% are using AI to help revise or edit content. It’s mind-boggling to me that that’s not almost 100%. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I agree. Yes. Chip Griffin: Because it’s the easiest way to improve the quality of your content. Gini Dietrich: Yes, it is. Yes. Chip Griffin: So I just, I can’t even imagine not just saying, “Hey, take a quick look at this.” I mean, even if it’s just to proof it. Just take a look through- Right … make, make sure I haven’t- Right … missed anything obvious here, and you know. Right. Because anytime I run it through, it tends to find something. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: So why aren’t you at least doing that? Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I mean, it’s funny you say that because we just submitted an article to PR Daily, and I know that Allison Carter is a huge, huge, huge, huge stickler for AP style. So I have an AP style agent, and I ran it through there, and it, I think it got five or six different things that I had missed. I was like, “Thank heaven.” Like, ’cause she, she will send it back. She’ll be like, “Nope.” I mean, huge stickler. So, and like, yes, to your point, like you should be using it for that, 100%. Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, that’s just– to, to me that’s a very basic use, but there are so many great things th

    23 min

  4. May 14

    How agency owners can use AI as an always-on thought partner

    Most agency owners know AI can write a first draft or clean up copy. Far fewer have figured out how to use it as the strategic sounding board they’ve always needed. In this episode, Chip and Gini explore how to use AI tools as a thought partner, not just a content machine. Gini’s example is a client who asked her to map what a PESO model maturity ladder would look like for an organization. She described the situation and constraints to Chat GPT, and keep pushing the conversation forward. Six weeks of iterative back-and-forth surfaced ideas she wouldn’t have reached on her own, including finding the gaps when the AI was willing to poke holes in her thinking. Chip points out that for owner-led agencies, that 8pm Friday idea you don’t want to dump on your team now has somewhere to go. The tool doesn’t care what time it is, and it has no stake in whether your idea succeeds or embarrasses you. Both hosts advise to direct the AI to ask you questions rather than just answer them. It takes some coaching to get a tool that genuinely engages rather than validates everything you propose, but once you’re there, you start getting real value. One warning they have is that these tools are not always consistent. The same AI that helped you build a strategy three weeks ago might question it today with equally compelling reasoning. Stay in the driver’s seat, and treat AI-generated recommendations as input, not conclusions. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “You now have this always-on thought partner that, when that idea comes to you when you’re watching some Law & Order rerun or whatever, you can ask, ‘Hey, I just had this idea and what do you think of it?'” Gini Dietrich: “AI has really helped me just kind of think through some things that I hadn’t considered, some things I probably wouldn’t have considered, and it also helped poke some holes.” Chip Griffin: “The gap analysis is something that the AI tools do exceptionally well. And part of it is just making yourself vulnerable to it and it’s not judging you, because it doesn’t care.” Gini Dietrich: “The AI knows it can’t get fired. So it doesn’t have the same experience as one of your employees.” View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. 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 Gini, I think we need to talk to the robots today. Gini Dietrich: Yes, I love talking to the robots. Let’s do that. Chip Griffin: It’s a robot future, and we just, we need to, we need to figure out, I don’t know, some new ideas or something like that. Maybe we should have a conversation with our friendly neighborhood robot. Gini Dietrich: I like it. Let’s do that. You- Chip Griffin: Actually, that would be a, that would be a good episode at some point to actually- Gini Dietrich: It would be a, yeah … Chip Griffin: to, you know, we could have our first guest. We could have, like, Claude as our first guest on the show. Gini Dietrich: I love it. We should do that. That’s a good idea. Chip Griffin: And, and, and see how that goes. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, let’s. Chip Griffin: I don’t know. Maybe that’s not a good idea. Who knows? Anyway, we are going to talk about AI today, ’cause we haven’t talked about AI at all lately. Nope. And we won’t be talking about it soon when we have the Saga AI survey results to talk about, hopefully on the next episode. But we thought we would talk today about AI in more practical terms because we’ve done a lot of talking about AI in, in sort of high-level strategic ways and how important it is to agencies and how we need to be thinking about it and integrating it and thinking about the costs of it and all of that kind of stuff. But I think it’s helpful for us to have some conversations with and for our listeners about some practical uses of AI that, that we’ve used, that we’ve come across, that we use ourselves- Yep … in order to, to get the maximum value out of this new technology. And, a good place to start is how do you use whatever platform of choice you have, or maybe multiple platforms of choice, to help you as a thought partner to not just, you know, write things and spew stuff out more quickly or something like that, but really to hone ideas, to get advice, to have someone to bounce things off of. And I mean someone in quotes here because, yes, I know it’s not human, okay? So don’t- … don’t send me notes about how, “You know these things aren’t real.” I know that, okay? Gini Dietrich: I do know that. I got it. Yes. I am aware. Chip Griffin: So- Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think it’s, I think it’s such a… First of all, it’s a good topic, and I think it’s something that’s fun for the two of us to talk about because I think we’re both, like, full-on in. For me, when I realized it could be a thought partner for me, it was two and a half years ago, and a client came to me, and they came to me specifically, and they said, “We would really like to understand what the PESO model maturity ladder looks like, especially inside an organization like ours.” And, at the time, I had an idea of what the maturity model looked like just generally, right? But being able to apply it to a really specific situation and a really specific organization and really specific brands, I hadn’t thought through yet. And of course, I can’t put the client’s information in there, right? But I can think about, I could… I, at the time I was like, “Okay, so how do I start to think about this with the constraints that I know they have and sort of how they run PESO now, which isn’t in a true operating system, but more sort of pick and choose tactics.” So I went into, at the time, ChatGPT, and I think Claude does a better work of this now, but I went into ChatGPT and I started asking questions. “So if you had to create… First of all, if you had to create a PESO model maturity ladder based on these seven sort of levels that I had already thought through, how would you do that?” And we just went back and forth, and we asked each other questions. And it would, it, it came up with some things where I was like, “Huh, hadn’t considered that.” So then I would sort of put those over to the side and we would continue. And then I said, “Okay, great. Now here are some some constraints, right? We know, we know it has these, the organization has these constraints. We know that it takes, you know, six, six to eight months to be able to do anything, like all of this stuff. How would you change it based on that?” And so we went back and forth on that. Now, granted, it took probably six weeks for me to get something usable to be able to take to the client, but I wouldn’t have been able to come up with that on my own. And I don’t think that even conversations with my team, we would’ve been able to come up with the, all of that on our own. And so it really helped me just kind of think through some things that I hadn’t considered, some things I probably wouldn’t have considered, and it also helped poke some holes. So then I said, “Okay, great. Here’s what I’m thinking. Poke holes in it.” And it was like, “This doesn’t work, this doesn’t work, this doesn’t work.” And so it just helps you… It was at that point, which I think was two and a half years ago, it was, it’ll be three years in August, really think it, think through sort of beginning to end that I wouldn’t have been able to do on my own. Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a great discussion of your evolution on that, and in my case, I was, I was later to the AI party in terms of In-depth use of it. Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm Chip Griffin: I, I was very early on to kick the tires, which may have been to my detriment, right? Because the very early incarnations of a lot of these tools was not the best. Gini Dietrich: Not good. Chip Griffin: And, so I, you know, I certainly was, you know, spending a fair bit of time using it for, you know, the basics. You know, some basic writing and editing, some basic image creation. Certainly, you know, transcription, speech-to-text, those kinds of things. But a lot of that, but not really as much in the in-depth strategic areas- Gini Dietrich: Sure, sure … Chip Griffin: until probably a little over a year ago when I started to realize that there had been this shift and that it, it was, at least to me, a lot more usable. And, really just, you know, opening my mind up to what you could actually do with the tools beyond the simple use cases. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: And I think the more time you spend with it, the more you realize just how helpful it can be. And, and particularly in, you know, small owner-led agencies, the… You know, we’ve all sat there and we’ve had an idea at, you know, 8 o’clock on a Friday night or over the weekend, and we’re like, “God, we, I wish we could…You know, I can’t bother the team with this right now though.” Yep, yep. “But I kinda, I kinda wanna continue thinking this through.” Yep. And so you now have this- Yep … you know- Thought partner … always on thought partner- Yep … that, you know, when that idea comes to you, when you’re watching some Law & Order rerun or whatever, you’re like, “Hey, you know, I just had this idea and, you know, what do you think of it?” And, it feels weird the first few times you do it, this, to sit there and say to, you know, the chatbot, “Hey, what, what do you think of this idea?” And, but you learn so much from it because it is, it is able to ask questions, to poke holes, to find

    16 min

  5. May 7

    Stop making sacrifices your agency doesn’t need you to make

    Most agency owners think they’re doing their team a favor when they quietly absorb the painful, tedious, or time-consuming work. They’re likely not. In this episode, Chip Griffin and Gini Dietrich look at the sacrifices owners make on behalf of their teams and why those sacrifices often create more problems than they solve. This isn’t about the occasional tactical sacrifice, it’s about the systemic ones: the conscious decisions to absorb entire categories of work because you’ve decided your team would find them too difficult, too unpleasant, or too much of a burden. Gini admits she’s guilty of it herself, sharing that a new COO sat her down with a list of tasks she’d been handling and told her she shouldn’t be doing any of them. The jobs weren’t glamorous, but they weren’t the owner’s job either. Chip extends this into two areas where owner sacrifice tends to do the most damage: new business development, where owners keep proposals and pitches entirely to themselves thinking they’re protecting team time, and org chart design, where flat structures are usually not a deliberate choice but the result of owners absorbing management responsibilities no one else wanted. Both patterns block team growth and overload the owner at the same time. Gini describes a practice she returns to every quarter, sorting her task list into three buckets — things only she can do, things she enjoys but probably doesn’t need to do, and things she absolutely should not be doing. The third list gets delegated immediately. Chip puts it like this: for everything on your plate, ask yourself why you are the one doing it. If there isn’t a good answer, stop doing it. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “The number of sacrifices that many owners make is extreme and poorly thought out. They solve problems for today, but create problems for the future.” Gini Dietrich: “On a new business front, if you bring team members in, even though you might feel guilty about it not being non-billable work, they have the ability to become engaged with the prospect early on, understand the work that you’re doing, and give a different perspective.” Chip Griffin: “If most people are reporting into the owner, it’s usually because either they’re a control freak or because they feel like they don’t want to burden people with management.” Gini Dietrich: “I sit down with my task list and I split it into three groups. Things that are on my list that only I can do. Things that are on my list that I enjoy doing, but I probably don’t need to do. And things that are on my list that I absolutely should not be doing. The last list needs to be delegated immediately.” Related The one hand rule: you probably have too many direct reports Letting go as an agency owner Preparing for your agency’s group presentations and pitches View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. 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 Gini, I, you know, I think I need to make some sacrifices for this show. I think that, Gini Dietrich: oh, goodie, Chip Griffin: that I need to make my life more painful so that yours is better. Gini Dietrich: Oh, even better. Yes. Okay, great. I have a whole list of things you can do. Chip Griffin: I, I have no doubt. A few of them might even relate to the show, right? Gini Dietrich: Probably not. Like laundry, laundry’s on the list, meal planning’s on the list, all sorts of things. Chip Griffin: Oh, meal planning. Gini Dietrich: Oh, sure. Laundry. Yeah. Chip Griffin: Yeah, that. Good luck with that. In any case, before I dig any kind of a hole for myself here, beyond what I already have, the real topic is the sacrifices that owners make for their businesses for reasons that aren’t always good and don’t make a lot of sense if you’re building an actual business that you want to own. Gini Dietrich: I have no idea what you’re talking about. Chip Griffin: We’ve all look, we’ve all done it. We’ve all done it. But I think we do need to make a mindset shift. It’s so hard and we need to, we need to stop saying things like, I don’t wanna ask my team to do this, so I’m gonna do it myself. Or my team, they would struggle with this, so I’ll just handle it. Or the worst one, and the one that’s most common is, I need to make sure I’m paying my team fairly. I don’t really have enough, so I’m, I’m gonna just, you know, underpay myself. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: The number of sacrifices that many owners make is extreme and poorly thought out. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: They solve problems for today, but create problems for the future. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I will even say like I am super, super guilty of that. Not the money one, I’ve learned that lesson and I pay myself a living wage, but the rest of it I’m very guilty of. And I spend most of my weekends getting caught up on work. And just today, today we’re recording. It’s a Monday. I sat down at my desk and I’m like, I’m already exhausted. Like just brain capacity wise. That’s not good. If I’m starting Monday off like that, it’s not good. So I think it’s, it’s a lesson I continue to have to learn. And sometimes we do podcast episodes so that I can hear myself give advice that I need to take. And this is one of them. Chip Griffin: Do you, do you listen to yourself afterwards? Gini Dietrich: Sometimes. Chip Griffin: I listen to every episode. It’s like a, it’s like a, it’s like a, a ballplayer don’t watching game tapes. Oh, I do. Gini Dietrich: No you don’t. You do? You do not. Do you really? Chip Griffin: I absolutely do. I watch every single episode. Gini Dietrich: For real? Chip Griffin: A hundred percent for real. Gini Dietrich: I did not know you did that. Chip Griffin: I do. Yeah. No, it’s, it’s like, it really is like game tape to me. So I, I always want to try to figure out what I can do, you know, better or different. Plus, honestly, I do love the sound of my own voice. I, I know that that makes me sound like an egomaniac, but I actually, I do actually enjoy it. I find my voice, my own voice soothing. Gini Dietrich: I don’t enjoy that. So. Chip Griffin: Yeah. But anyway, before we really just jump off the rails here, I, I mean, I do think that it is, it is a valuable thing for owners to sit down and look at, you know, what are the sacrifices that you’re making and why are you making it? There are some sacrifices that we all need to make at some point in our business. I’m not saying that you should never make a sacrifice on behalf of your business, but you need to understand why you’re doing it and make sure that it really is a rational decision. And not because you’re, you’re putting off a more difficult conversation or decision that you might need to make, or because you are more worried about other people than yourself. You really do need to be a bit selfish as an owner. You are taking on a lot of risk and stress and all of that. And if you’re not doing it for your own benefit, why? Sure. You can go be miserable somewhere else and probably get paid more to do it. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, two things for me. It’s because I… I am so busy and I spend most of my days in meetings. And so because I spend most of my days in meetings, I like, I use, I have a running log of things that need to get done, and sometimes I don’t get to that running log in time to delegate it to somebody. So it just needs to get done. And that, that for me is the cycle that’s hard for me to break because I’m not, I’m just not gonna say to somebody at six o’clock on a Friday night, Hey, I need this by Monday, I’m just not gonna do that. Sure. I would rather. Right. So for me, the, I have to figure out a different way of working so that I can properly delegate and give people enough time. That’s, that’s the cycle for me. But you know, I work with lot, I have lots of friends who own agencies, I work with agency owners and I see the cycle is less that and more control and thinking that I’m the only one who can do this work, and when in fact that’s not true. Maybe you’re the only one who will do it a certain way, but you have to be able to delegate and you can’t grow a business if you don’t do those things effectively. Chip Griffin: Right. And, and they are, I mean, these are definitely interrelated problems where you either you want the control because you feel like you can do it better, faster or whatever. But then there is also the, the sacrifice piece of it, which is you’re doing it because you… not so much because you think you could do it better than somebody else, but because you don’t want to burden them with that. And in, in your case, you know, where you’re saying, I, I don’t want to give someone something at six o’clock on a Friday that I need for Monday morning. That, yes, that is making a sacrifice. But there are, as you say, there are reasons that, you know, you didn’t get to something soon enough in order to pass it along. So I, I’m really more looking at the the systemic sacrifices that you’re making. Yep. Where you make just a conscious decision that this, this group of tasks, I’m not comfortable asking someone else to do. Not because I can necessarily do it better, but because it would be painful for them to undertake. They would, they would not enjoy it. They would stress out about it. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna relieve them of that burden. That is not really your role. If it’s not work that’s appropriately sitt

    19 min

  6. Apr 30

    Preparing for your agency’s group presentations and pitches

    In this episode, Chip and Gini open with the analogy of Canadian doubles, the tennis format where two players face one. If your team outnumbers the prospect, you don’t project strength, you project awkwardness. But the conversation goes well beyond headcount. A little preparation goes a long way in making sure every seat on your side is justified. You’ll want to match expertise to whoever the prospect brought, which requires actually knowing who’s coming. Gini described a recent pitch where she reverse-engineered her attendee list based entirely on who was showing up from the prospect’s side. That’s not logistics, it’s strategy. And whoever is in the room during the pitch needs to be the person doing the work after the contract is signed — not a handoff to a team with no context and no ownership. Both Chip and Gini are emphatic that the meeting itself should not feel rehearsed like a school play. Agency owners who show up prepared to have a real conversation before pitching solutions will stand out. Harder for many owners is knowing when to keep quiet. Interjecting while a team member gives an imperfect answer undermines their confidence, signals to the prospect they can’t be trusted, and makes them rely on you. The debrief after the meeting is where the coaching happens. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “You can’t do the bait and switch. You’ve gotta make sure that whoever they’re getting to know during the prospecting phase, that that’s who they’re going to be working with.” Gini Dietrich: “I would go to the meetings. I would create the proposal. I would sell it, I would close it, and then I would hand it off. And my team was like, they weren’t bought in. They didn’t understand…The client always felt like, well, I wanna work with you because you were in the room and that’s who we bought.” Chip Griffin: “The more you talk, it does three things. It undermines the confidence of your team member. It undermines the confidence of the client in your team. And it also puts you in a position where you are putting yourself as more necessary to the ongoing success of the relationship. And none of those things are good.” Gini Dietrich: “One of the things I think that sets a small agency apart from a large one is being able to diagnose the problem, being able to ask the questions and really have a conversation instead of doing a dog and pony show. It’s gonna be so much more appreciated because now you’re treating yourselves like their partner instead of their vendor.” View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. 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 today we’re gonna play Canadian Doubles. No, we’re not. For those of you who are not familiar, Canadian Doubles is a version of tennis where you have two players on one side of the net and one player on the other side. Did you know that? Gini Dietrich: I have so many, I have so many questions. Chip Griffin: I don’t know why they do that. And the only reason I even know about it is because of discussions that we’ve had, in the past, or that I had, you know, 30 years ago with some business partners was how you, what the dynamics are of meeting with teams, particularly from a prospect when you’re pitching them on things. And so we always said, you know, we wanna avoid playing Canadian doubles, basically where you’re outnumbering your opponent or prospect in this case. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think that’s really smart because you, you probably want to at least balance it, if not come just a little bit under, because when you have more people from your team than the client has, it tends to overpower them and become a little bit overwhelming for ’em, which is not what you want. That’s not the impression you want to leave. Chip Griffin: No. I mean, it’s, uh, you know, any time that, that you, you are in a position where you are confronted by a larger number of people, whether that’s, you know, in combat, in sales, in whatever. You know, you, you don’t like that you, you kind of want even numbers, right? But that’s, we’re gonna go beyond that, folks. So just so you know, we’re not talking just about the numbers of people. Gini Dietrich: The end. Chip Griffin: But really, you know, I thought it would be helpful for us to have a conversation about how you handle group presentations with prospects or even potentially with clients or those sorts of things, because it’s something that many of us, even in small agencies often do where we’ll have more than one person in the room or on a call, pitching to a client, talking them through things. So there’s a lot of things that go into that. How many people, how do you split up the presentation time? How do you make sure that everybody looks like they’re contributing in a meaningful way? How do you manage the time when you’ve got multiple voices speaking and make sure that you’ve got a real dialogue? So. I think there’s a lot of things to consider anytime you’re doing group presentations and it’s something that since we often end up having to do it, it’s worth thinking about how to do it well. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I completely agree. It’s, you know, one of the things that we think about it all the time, especially we, not just with new business, but with clients too. You know, we had a meeting a couple of weeks ago with a client and they really wanted me in the room, but there were only two of them and there were five of us, and so we had to kind of decide is it really important for me to be in the room? Then, and that’s the case then who are we not going to have in the room from, you know, the client team perspective. And so we went back and forth about it to decide who, who needed to be there for sure, and who was sort of ancillary and who could just get updates later. But it’s definitely something we think about all the time, not just with prospects, both with clients too. Chip Griffin: Yeah. And when I’ve worked in larger agencies, I mean, there have been times where, you know, you feel like you’re in an international summit because, you know, one side’s got 10 people, the other side’s got, you know, 12 or 13. And, and I think those are just silly on both sides. I mean, I don’t understand the value of having that many people in the room for a pitch, really, at any point. So for most of our listeners, that’s not the size and scale that we’re talking about, but I do think it’s important to think through why every single person is in that conversation. From your side in particular. Obviously you can’t really control who the other side brings, although it is worth understanding who they’re bringing and maybe asking them questions about, you know, whether, you know, whether that’s the right mix. Do they need to add somebody? Does, does that person really need to be there for this conversation? You can do that diplomatically so that you have the right mix of people on both sides. But everybody on your side, at least the side you control, needs to have a clear purpose for being there. And you shouldn’t throw extra bodies in just to show Hey, we’ve got these smart people. ’cause I’ve been in plenty of those presentations where like, we don’t really need you for anything. We just want you to be here so that they know that you exist. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Chip Griffin: And that’s an important temptation to resist because oftentimes the other side will walk out saying, well, why was that person there? That didn’t make any sense. Gini Dietrich: Right. Yes. I think too, if you do your due diligence to say, you know, who from your side is going to be there, then you can sort of match expertise, right? So we had a new business, a new business meeting last week, and from their side they had the VP of comms from two business lines. They had the chief communications officer and they had two data analytics people. So from my side, I ensured that we had at least two communications professionals, at least one data person, myself and our chief Revenue Officer were there. And so it sort of matched the same level of expertise. And everybody was able to have conversations with their peers to be able to understand, okay, this is what they’ll do and this is how they’ll help us. And it was really, really valuable from that perspective. You know, could I have handled the communications piece of it for probably three or four of them? Sure. But I also don’t, I’m not gonna be the point of contact from a day-to-day perspective. So I wanted to make sure that the people that were in the room also were gonna be the day-to-day point points of contact. So you, you can kind of massage that a little bit based on who’s in the room from the client’s perspective or the prospect’s perspective and really understanding, okay, You know, we have to think about it both from the perspective of do we have the expertise on our side to match that. And who will be the day-to-day contact on our side that they would be working with. So that they don’t feel like we’re doing a swap, you know, once the business is won that they’ve then now have to work with the lower class employees. Chip Griffin: Right. I mean, those are, those are two fantastic points. And, so I really wanna underscore those. The first is the simplest one, which is you can’t do the bait and switch. You’ve gotta make sure that whoever they’re getting to know during the prospecting phase, that that’s who they’re going to be working with. Maybe not every single person who’s in the room, but at least whoever they

    23 min

  7. Apr 23

    Rethink entry-level hiring to succeed in the AI era

    The entry-level talent pipeline is being entirely restructured. If agency owners don’t figure out what role a young professional actually plays in an AI-assisted agency, they won’t just struggle to hire today. They’ll have no one to promote in five years. In this episode, Chip and Gini dig into what’s happening with entry-level hiring right now, and why the answer can’t be to stop hiring junior staff altogether. The conversation covers why the old model of routine work is gone, what needs to replace it, and why agencies that don’t solve this problem soon are setting themselves up for failure. The episode opens with an observation from Gini: every presentation she gives to college classes lately surfaces the same anxiety from students. Nobody’s hiring at the entry level because AI can handle the work those roles used to cover — news releases, media lists, social drafts, basic research. How can they find jobs today, and get the on-the-job training they need to move forward in their careers? Chip frames the problem as a junction of circumstances: the rise of AI, economic uncertainty, and a higher education system that hasn’t evolved with the workforce reality. Colleges discouraging AI use while their graduates are about to enter workplaces built around it is, as he puts it, the same mistake as banning calculators in math class. The students coming in aren’t unprepared because they’re less capable, they’re underprepared because the institutions that trained them weren’t keeping up with the times. Chip and Gini agree that entry-level hires aren’t obsolete, but the role must change. Instead of being the lowest rung of the ladder, new professionals need to come in already functioning like managers — just managing AI tools and processes instead of people. That requires more on-the-job training, better-documented processes and SOPs, and a genuine commitment to learning and development that most agencies still don’t have. There’s more than one upside, though. Better documentation and SOPs don’t just help entry-level hires do their jobs — they make your agency more efficient, reduce owner dependency, and, for those who want to sell someday, significantly improve the value of the business. Their closing argument is not to avoid entry-level hiring because the old version of the role is antiquated. Rethink what the role is, invest in the systems that support it, and get comfortable assigning junior people with responsibilities that would have felt premature five years ago. The alternative is a mid-level talent shortage that will be very hard to fix. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “Effectively everybody is starting out as a manager now. It just may be that instead of managing people, you’re managing AI agents or assistants. That’s still a management role.” Gini Dietrich: “If we don’t solve this now as agency leaders and as an industry, there will be nobody at the mid-level to take the jobs in five years. No one.” Chip Griffin: “Don’t decide that you’re not going to hire them and just use the AI for it. Rethink what the role of an entry level hire is in your business because that will allow you to build both for today and for the future.” Gini Dietrich: “I think providing and teaching the young professionals how to use critical thinking skills to orchestrate an army of AI bots is exactly where we should be training them.” Related Managing Gen Z agency employees (and anyone else with less experience than you) ALP 34: How to help junior agency employees grow AI no threat to agency employees learning fundamental skills View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. 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 Gini, I, you know, I’m thinking about just getting started in the workforce now, and, you know, I’ve, I’ve never had a job in my life and Gini Dietrich: Oh, yeah. Chip Griffin: You know, being so young and green, I, I need to figure out what I’m going to do. Gini Dietrich: You know, it’s funny because I do a lot of zoom in… I zoom into a lot of classes to talk about PESO, and one of the questions I always get, and especially right now is, you know, how am I, what job am I gonna do when I graduate? How am I gonna get a good job? The job market sucks. Then nobody’s hiring for entry level because of AI. Like, what am I gonna do? And that question, I would say, that question has come up. In every single presentation that I’ve done for the last two years. And kids are really concerned about it. And, you know, in Counselor’s Academy through PRSA, we’ve been having the conversation too with other agency owners about, you know, who’s hiring entry level, and if you are, what are you doing? And it’s crickets. Like nobody’s hiring entry level professionals right now, because everything that we would have someone do as a brand new professional or as an intern, AI can do and do it much more effectively. So, you know, news releases and blog posts, drafts and social media drafts and media lists and all that, like, it’s way more efficient to have AI do it. So one of the conversations we’ve been having here is it’s really important to me as an individual to continue to give back to the industry. So how do we create an intern program that’s less about that kind of work and more about giving them the critical skills that they need to be able to orchestrate prompts, integrate AI into their roles. And I think that, I think that’s the path that we are gonna probably go down. Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, it, it’s an important topic. It is, I think there’s a confluence of events that are making it particularly challenging for entry-level workers today. So you’ve got the rise of AI along with economic and other uncertainty coming together. So, you know, there, there’s a number of forces that just make it really difficult. And I think it’s all layered on top of a higher education system that frankly is almost entirely broken. Yeah. And obviously that’s not really something we’re gonna solve here on, on this show, nor is it really the general domain of it. But I think it is, it’s a fundamental challenge that, that most higher education is not really oriented around helping students to find jobs afterwards. Right. That’s, that’s almost an afterthought. Yep. And I’m not saying that it needs to become vocational training. At the same time, you know, four years of pure academics, and discouraging the use of things like AI. A lot of, you know, colleges and universities say, oh no, no, you can’t use AI to complete your papers. Well, that’s not the reality that these students are about to embark upon. Gini Dietrich: Right. Chip Griffin: And so, you know, to me, that reminds me of, you know, years gone by where, oh, you can’t use Wikipedia, you can’t use the internet. You can’t use calculators. I mean, when I grew up, you can’t use a calculator in math class. I mean, these things just, it really is an antiquated system. So you’ve got that as their stepping stone into the workforce, and then they’ve got these headwinds of the economy and AI fighting against them. And so I do think it is, it’s a challenge for the industry, but ultimately it’s a challenge for individual agencies as well. Because even if you don’t want to give back, you have to think about how you’re going to staff your business, not just today, but for the longer term. And historically, agencies have promoted from within quite often, or hired somebody who was an entry level somewhere else. And so at some point, if we don’t figure out how to solve this entry level hire problem, we’re gonna be in a situation where there’s nobody out there for those mid-tier roles that we need to hire still. Gini Dietrich: Right. That’s exactly right. And that’s the, we continue to have that conversation in every single one of my leadership team meetings where there is a section where we’re talking about interns on the path for entry-level professionals. Because you’re exactly right, if we don’t solve this now as agency leaders and as an industry, there will be nobody at the mid-level to take the jobs in five years. No one. So we have to figure this out. Chip Griffin: And I think a lot of it is reimagining what that entry level role is. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: Which means as, as owners, as bosses, we need to think about how we structure those roles. But it also means that in preparation for this, you know, colleges, universities, intern programs also need to be thinking about what skills they’re sending people into the workforce with. And I think I’ve mentioned this previously on the show, I mean, effectively everybody is starting out as a manager now. It just may, may be that instead of managing people, you’re managing AI agents or assistants. That’s still a management role. Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm.  Yep, yep. Chip Griffin: And so, you know, whereas we used to bring people in and, and they would be purely managed and just… They would be the, you know, the functionaries who did what we told them to do. They need to be in a position that they can actually direct resources right out of the gate. And so that, that requires a lot more training before the job, but really a lot more probably on the job training. And we’re awful at training managers at every level within our businesses, including most owners have just awful management skills. And so if we don’t have them at the higher levels, how do we get them to the entry level? Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think you’re right. I think we,

    19 min

  8. Apr 9

    Five words every agency owner needs to understand

    Most agency owners spend a lot of time thinking about growth, clients, and revenue. Far fewer think carefully about the words that define how they actually operate their businesses. In this episode, Chip and Gini dig into five of those words: leadership, management, accountability, responsibility, and authority. Leadership and management aren’t the same thing. Leadership is about vision and getting people to follow you. Management is about making the work happen. Knowing which one you’re stronger at is the first step toward building a team that covers your gaps. Accountability is the wrong place to start when a team member isn’t delivering. You can’t hold someone accountable for something you never clearly assigned, and you can’t hold them accountable if you didn’t give them the authority to get it done. Gini offers a useful comparison: when a client hires you for your expertise and then second-guesses every decision, it’s demoralizing. That’s exactly how your team feels when you delegate the work but not the authority to do it. The episode closes with a simple reminder. If you want more freedom as an owner, you have to be willing to actually let go. And if your team isn’t capable of handling more responsibility, you should be asking yourself why you hired them. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “You can’t really have accountability without the other two things. You can’t go and hold an employee accountable for something that you never told them that they had to do to begin with.” Gini Dietrich: “I think we are all guilty of thinking that management is, oh, we get to boss people around and tell people what to do.” Chip Griffin: “If I want to hold an employee accountable for profitability on something, or for results on a client project, I actually need to give them the responsibility and authority to do what they need to do in order to get that.” Gini Dietrich: “When you try to control everything, when you don’t delegate effectively, when you don’t give your team the authority and responsibility to do their jobs effectively, you are creating an environment that’s not fun to work in.” Turn ideas into action Write down who owns what. Pick three ongoing projects or responsibilities in your agency and write one name next to each. If you can’t, or if the answer is “everyone,” that’s the problem to solve first. Audit one recent accountability failure. Think of the last time a team member didn’t deliver on something. Ask honestly: did they have clear responsibility for it, and did they have the authority to get it done without coming back to you for approvals? Identify the specific gap. Read Chip’s two-part newsletter series on these five words. They cover the concepts in more depth than a single conversation allows. Then write the five words on a post-it and put it somewhere you’ll actually see it. Related 5 words critical to agency management success (part 1) 5 words critical to agency management success (part 2) View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. 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: Gini, I’ve got, uh, I’ve got five words today, and that’s it. And then we’re outta here. Gini Dietrich: F…U… Chip Griffin: Words, not letters! No, we’ve already used more than five words, so. Gini Dietrich: Yep. No, Chip Griffin: I guess Gini Dietrich: you wrote about this. Chip Griffin: I guess we’re probably gonna need to come up with more than five words for this episode. Gini Dietrich: We’re, we should probably come up with several words for each of the five words, but you wrote about this and I thought it was really good. So we’re gonna talk about it. Chip Griffin: Yeah, last fall, as I was sitting there looking for inspiration for my newsletter, I started thinking about some of the language that I frequently use when I’m talking with agency owners. And so it became a two-part series in the SAGA newsletter, about five words that are critical to agency management success. And so, why not talk about them here? Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I think they’re really good. Chip Griffin: We’re always looking for ideas. Might as well pick something that we actually did a little work on. Gini Dietrich: Right. For a change. Chip Griffin: For a change. Gini Dietrich: We’ve got like four weeks in a row where we’ve done a little work. Chip Griffin: I mean, this is, I… dear listeners, please do not get used to this. We are not going to, you know, have actual prepared thoughts in advance of every episode. We just, we cannot handle that. A lot of it just needs to be off the cuff with us reacting to whatever randomly comes to mind in the seconds before I hit record. Gini Dietrich: That’s right. Chip Griffin: But this week we can tap into a little bit more depth. Last week, I mean, last week we did a lot of research for episode 300. Gini Dietrich: We did. We spent like days on that. It was a year’s worth of content. Chip Griffin: We did research, we brought AI into it. We started reading through past, I mean Gini Dietrich: mm-hmm. Yep. Chip Griffin: It was, it was truly exhausting, so Gini Dietrich: it was exhausting. I’m still recovering. Chip Griffin: Fortunately this is work that was already done. We’re just retapping into it. So, those five words that we’re going to be talking about today are leadership, management, accountability, responsibility, and authority. And we’re really looking at this through the lens of management of your business. So there’s a lot of other things that have to do with agencies where we can come up with other words perhaps, or other context for these words. But this is really about how you manage the business, how you work with your team, how you work with clients, and all that sort of thing. And that was really what I was trying to get at here when I was trying to drill into these particular concepts. Gini Dietrich: I think the first two leadership and management are really good ones because I think we are all guilty of thinking that management is, oh, we get to boss people around and tell people what to do and, you know, go on about our days. And, I think we also confuse leadership and management. And so I think a good place to start is definitely there, which you did too, because it’s part one of your series. Chip Griffin: I did, I thought those were, yeah, those were big important concepts to get squared away before you get into some of the ones that, you know, later on in the list are, are a little bit more nitty gritty. And really about the functional aspect of it. When you’re thinking about leadership and management, you really have to think about it in my view in, in a couple of different ways and, leadership is more getting people who are willing and interested in following you somewhere. Right? It is, it is defining a path and convincing people, whether that’s prospects that you’re trying to get to become clients or team members who you’re getting to work together. It really is, it’s more about, you know, the ideas and the communication around it and the motivation of people that comes together. Management then becomes more about resources and, you know, and more of the, in the management of it to… management’s more about management. How’s that for…there is a limit how much we prepare for these things. It’s not like I have clear talking points. Gini Dietrich: I would say management’s more in weeds. So like, if I were thinking about it from my, my agency’s perspective. I tend to be more of the leader, so I’m vision, visionary, I’m setting the stage, I’m talking about where we’re going. And then Shelly, who is our chief operating Officer, she’s doing like standard operating procedures. She’s creating process, she’s creating procedures. She’s created an intranet where you get where you get out. Like that stuff to me, I would shoot myself in the head if I had to do that stuff. But she’s really, really good at it and she’s really good at creating the process. Like these are the things, this is how we do our work. And so she allows me to focus on what I’m good at, and I, and then, and she in turn gets to focus on what she’s good at. Chip Griffin: Yeah. And that, and that CEO-COO split is, is a good, you know, sort of simple way of thinking about the difference in leadership and management. It’s not a hundred percent sure, but it’s, it gets you most of the way there in, in how you think it through. I do think that almost all managers at every level need a little bit of both. Yeah, you can’t totally, even if you are a relatively junior manager. If you’ve got anybody reporting to you or you’re managing a project, you still need to have some of the leadership there in addition to the management. So, but they are, they’re really important things to have. They are different things, but you need to be, in order to be successful as an agency business, you need to have both of these in robust amounts within the business. Otherwise, you’ll be rudderless, you’ll be profitless, and you probably won’t be generating results for your clients. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I think it’s, I mean, I personally believe that you’re, you have strengths in one or the other. You can probably do both. Like I can manage the business. I don’t love it, so I’m not great at it. I procrastinate, I can do it. But that’s why I hired somebody to manage those kinds of things. Because I know how important it is. And, but if you can’t, if you don

    21 min
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4.8
out of 5
19 Ratings

About

Chip Griffin and Gini Dietrich help PR and marketing agency owners make better decisions about the businesses they run. With 300+ episodes, the Agency Leadership Podcast covers the topics owners deal with every week: pricing, profitability, hiring, client management, positioning, and what it takes to build an agency worth owning. Chip is the founder of SAGA Agency Growth Advisors and creator of the Build to Own approach. Gini is the founder of Spin Sucks and creator of the PESO Model. 

Information

  • Creator
    Chip Griffin and Gini Dietrich
  • Years Active
    2018 - 2026
  • Episodes
    100
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright SAGA Agency Growth Advisors
  • Show Website
    Agency Leadership Podcast

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