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Verbatim text
Lee:
Before we start today’s show, let me share with you something super exciting that we are launching. That’s an event here in the uk, all around helping you transform your agency. So if you look back over the last year, maybe two years, and feel frustrated that maybe you’ve not moved forward, then this is the event for you. Cheque it out over on Agency Transformation Live. That’s Agency Transformation Live. We have got speakers from all around the world here to help you plan your next 90 days, your next three months, your next year, whatever that needs to be to help you get the level of transformation that you need in your business. That’s AgencyTransformation live. We’ll see you there. Welcome to the Agency Trailblazer podcast. This is your host, Lee, and on today’s show we are talking with Andrew Pitchford. He is sharing with us their process and workflow for onboarding new clients and building up a long term relationship with them. This is one not to be missed, so sit back, relax and enjoy the ride.
Lee:
Welcome to A conversation with me, Mr. Lee Jackson.
Lee:
And today we have the Director of Client Engagement, Mr. Andrew Pitchford from Excitemedia.com.
Lee:
Au how was that? Is that a good intro for you?
Andrew:
Hey, crikey, mate, I’d rather tackle a taipan than be on this programme.
Lee:
I hope you don’t talk like that for the whole show. I’m not 100% sure what you just said.
Andrew:
Well, it’s funny. I mean, I’m a Yorkshire born Kiwi raised Australian, but everybody thinks that we speak like Hugh Jackman and that’s not true.
Lee:
That’s not true. No, he’s awesome. Hugh Jackman, like one of the best exports from Australia. Just saying.
Andrew:
And sadly, I can’t sing and dance like him. But that’s not what you had me here for.
Lee:
No, but you’ve got the body of.
Andrew:
Him, obviously, so thank you, you’re very kind.
Lee:
I imagine I have too as well. When I look in the mirror, that’s what I see anyway.
Andrew:
You know, it’s funny, I look through your Instagram and the only thing I see is duck face. Duck face. Duck face. And you are certainly the master, so I bow to the duck face.
Lee:
Well, thank you very much. Although Chris Ducker seems to think, because his last name has got duck in it, that he’s the duck face champion. And I don’t believe him. I don’t like it. Although he’s got a bigger audience than me, so he managed to get more people to vote. In fact, I’m still a bit Upset about that. We had this competition on Instagram about duck face and even our own community, Andrew, our own community of agency, trailblazers voted for him. I still feel a bit upset about that. It really is. But thank you for being loyal to my duck face. I appreciate that. But anyway, it’s not about me, it’s absolutely about Andrew today. I’m really excited to have you on the show, buddy. I would love to find out a little bit about you first before we talk about Excite Media. So we’ve already learned that you’re Yorkshire born, Kiwi raised. What else can you let us know? Perhaps your favourite colour, whereabouts in Oz, RU and all of those sort of good things and then we’ll jump into the business.
Andrew:
A little bit of background. I was born in Dewsbury or Wakefield in Yorkshire, but spent most of my life growing up in New Zealand. So the All Blacks reign. I’ve got my All Blacks cup right in front of me. Spent a lot of time in radio, was involved with UCB in the uk, radiorema in New Zealand and Vision here in Australia. But after I got out of that, I’ve always had this love of all things digital. I remember building my first website back in 1995. Microsoft were charging the Earth for dial up. It was a horrendous time. I’m still getting over that.
Lee:
You’re still paying it off?
Andrew:
Yeah, we took a loan on the credit card, but outside of that, I’m a movie geek. I just love, you know, whether it’s going out to see the latest Marvel. We worked it out. There’s four Marvel movies being released this year and two DC movies and that’s like an exciting year for me. And if you came and saw my office, it’s filled with pop vinyls. Do you know the little pop vinyl characters that you can buy?
Lee:
Yep. Larissa is now your new best friend.
Andrew:
She has all those in my office. I’ve got around. I think it’s around 100 Star wars ones. And then in the garage we have the boxes of Marvel and Doctor who pop vinyls that my wife says I should sell and I commit to sell and they still stay in the boxes and we’re getting over it. But best life as a geek.
Lee:
Yes. Geek/Nerd. I think. I’m not sure. There’s kind of this fine line, isn’t there? When you’ve got that many, I’m pretty sure you’re kind of crossing that line of nerd, which is awesome. I salute you. It’s like super geek.
Andrew:
Yeah. I think it depends on how much budget. If you can look at your credit card limit and say that you haven’t reached it yet, you’re a geek. But when you get right over it, you are a nerd.
Lee:
And when you’re made to promise to sell things and don’t. Yeah, I think you’ve graduated to nerd. That’s hilarious. Well, that’s brilliant, mate. And I’m glad you like Star wars as well. So you’re not a Trekkie then, You’re a Star wars guy.
Andrew:
Listen, I’m actually quite happy to play both sides of the fence. Thank you, Netflix, for every episode that you provide for me. And my wife and I were looking at going on a cruise recently and I saw there’s actually a Star Trek cruise happening over in the US where all the team from Voyager are going to be on. And that is so tempting, but really, probably not this year.
Lee:
That would be incredible. Voyager was my absolute favourite series ever. Voyager was that whole story of being catapulted miles from home. And the whole thing, was it seven seasons or something? Just completely captured my imagination. Although I really do love the new Discovery series as well on Netflix. So again, thank you, Netflix. All right, so this is all for a different podcast, really. We need to do like a geek podcast. And I feel like me and you could probably now create something sold from this episode. This feels like the birth of something. But let’s move on because this is Agency Trailblazer and I’d love to know about the company that you have that mega cool title of. Let’s go over this again. It’s the Director of Client Engagement, Mr. Andrew Pitchford. Bit like a James Bond esque sort of title. So tell, tell us a little bit about how that business all got started.
Andrew:
Yeah, it’s a little bit sad. I had to get those extended business cards to fit the title on, but a little printing charge, a little fold out. Listen, I’m actually really privileged to work for a couple of guys, Nathaniel Hubbard and Scott Maynard. These are two guys that went to school together in Brisbane, then went to uni and then formed a little agency. And from there it’s just grown. They’ve been going for 14 years and I joined them back in 2014, came on board to do business development. I love working with customers and trying to solve problems. And so that was a match made in heaven. When I joined them, there was only about seven or eight of us and we were working out of a couple of little retail outlets. I think one used to be a butcher’s One used to be a bookshop and from there it’s grown and the last four years have been absolutely chaotic, to put it mildly. We’ve now got about 32 staff. We moved into new premises in an old theatre that used to be a Shakespearean in the Realm Theatre. That’s absolutely brilliant. It’s a great creative hub right in the middle of Brisbane and we’ve moved from being just web and design to probably about half the business being focused on digital marketing and half on those kind of short term projects.
Andrew:
Get the website out, get the logo and branding done. So there’s a really good balance in what we’re able to offer.
Lee:
That’s incredible. And they were both in college together, the original guys, weren’t they?
Andrew:
Yeah. We’ve got the old photos from what they call school these days here, which is the celebration of leaving secondary school. We’ve got the photos of them being in the newspaper when they first launched their business. Oh, they’re both musos as well. So there’s a lot of history in the bands that they’ve been in the bands that they have today. So it’s always been a creative string that’s weaved its way through the Excite Media story.
Lee:
Yeah, that’s awesome. And folks, before we carry on, if you just cheque out the Excite media website, that’s excitemedia.com a you go and have a look at the About Us page. I’m having great fun mousing over. I’ve been doing it for this entire call is mousing over all of your team members and enjoying the different images that appear. Jack Howman, who likes fishing.
Andrew:
Oh, yes. He’s an absolute nutter.
Lee:
I think Nick Mock is a magician.
Andrew:
I’m guessing there was CGI involved in that photo.
Lee:
Oh, was that? Okay, fair enough. And you’ll also get to see Andrew’s insane. Well, some of Andrew’s collection, including some Doctor who memorabilia of which I’m really pleased to see.
Andrew:
Nice little tablets there.
Lee:
We’re massive Doctor who fans over here, so that’s epic. That’s brilliant. So how did you come to get the job? I mean, what’s your background? Obviously you were building websites in 95 on dial up and getting a second mortgage to pay for the Internet. How did you get involved with them back in 2014? What was the little journey there?
Andrew:
Well, it’s a really interesting story because I’ve always wanted to be in radio and I actually started in New Zealand in a small country town. Radio station got transferred to Auckland, which is kind of the biggest city in New Zealand. And then I got transferred to Australia to set up this radio network and it was kind of a real great life story for a young 30 year old. We had a family, we had a six week old baby that we brought across to Australia and it was involved in setting up this Christian radio network which involved a whole lot of what they call low powered FM stations. So I was building radio stations, I was setting up all of the programming and that went brilliantly. But in amongst it all, we needed to do the marketing for it. And because I actually was already in love with doing websites, that became my forte. And so I was doing digital, I was doing social, you know, anything that needed to be done to get the word out, we did. And so people started to hear about what I was doing and I got asked to move back to New Zealand to head up the international office.
Andrew:
And they called it another great title, General Manager of Brands and New Media. It was a bigger business card again and it involved working with 31 countries around the world. And most of them were countries where there was not professionals, there were amateurs, there were volunteers, and we needed to help them get websites up and running. And WordPress was the way in which we did that. And so remotely we were helping all of these countries get their marketing and communications up and telling them about this thing called Facebook and podcasting and streaming and everything in between. Sadly, that dream job came to a bit of a grinding halt when they decided to retrench a whole lot of the activities. And I suddenly thought, I’m out of a job and I didn’t know what to do. You can imagine the pressure on a family. What do you do? You got to try and keep money flowing in to pay the rent or whatever else is happening at the time. And so I started Little Baby Agency in New Zealand. It was called Andral and that’s a combination of Andrew and Cheryl, my wife. We combine the name as every good couple does.
Lee:
No, that’s good.
Andrew:
That went for a little while, but I just found I couldn’t get the traction. One of the things I’m learning today is the power of being able to do your outsourcing and have all that structure in place. But when I did it, I was good at going out and getting the sales and terrible at fulfilling them. And so it ended up I was looking for a job again and when I couldn’t find a job in New Zealand, we applied back to Brisbane because we loved it. Australia was beautiful, great for our kids. And Excite Media offered me this job and came over for a three week trial and it turned into the last five years of our life. It’s been brilliant.
Lee:
That’s so cool. That’s a great journey and I can certainly connect with being able to sell the websites. But then when it comes to the delivery and everything else like that, without having a network of people, I very quickly got overwhelmed as well. And it was a real struggle very, very early on with those. I ended up going and working in security in the end because I just couldn’t, I couldn’t cope with it until I relaunched an agency with team members. That was the difference for me. I needed people. I couldn’t just do it on my own. I don’t know how some people do it. They can do the sales and they can sit there and put out amazing work and rinse and repeat, but I certainly don’t have that now. What I’m interested in is the journey of Excite Media. I mean, you joined back in 2014. I think a lot’s changed since then as well. And when me and you were chatting a few days ago, you’d mentioned that the agency wanted to move more into reoccurring digital marketing. So obviously it started off as your kind of your standard agency. How did you guys transfer kind of transition into that reoccurring digital marketing model?
Lee:
Because I think this is the holy grail for a lot of agencies and it’s a hot topic at the moment as well.
Andrew:
Yeah. And I think everybody’s recognised that if you need to go through those short term projects, you’re constantly having to top up your funnel with new leads and process them through and you’ve given the good, the bad and the ugly. That’s a consistent thing. But what we recognised is that while we could sell a logo package, sell a website and then tack on the digital marketing, it wasn’t sustainable and it wasn’t the right recipe with the client. So typically clients might have bought a six to ten thousand dollar website and oh, we’ll do a bit of SEO, oh, we’ll do a bit of Google Ads management for you. But it wasn’t the focus and if they got bored, they left. And the prices really weren’t that bad. Brilliant, Tybur. You were just paying for the management. And so we started to try and communicate to our clients that we can start with the end in mind and sit down with you and come up with a plan. And we ran probably for about two years of having our first iteration of that recurring revenue programme. We called it Web Iq. It was just a branding name for all things digital that we could do.
Andrew:
But I’ll tell you what’s happened. We found that even though people signed up for that and we had some really good recurring revenue, dollar amounts that were coming into the business, we still found that our clients were very reactive. Oh, turn the AdWords off, turn the Facebook on. Oh, by the way, can we squeeze this into the package this month? Because we really need this new landing page. And so we found that we weren’t planning ahead. And then we came across this international business model called EOS Traction. And it’s really worth checking out. There’s a book by Gino Wickham, there’s one called Traction, there’s another one called what the heck is eos? And both of them really explain it. And we started applying it to our business to try and get some structure. But then we thought, hey, R and D doesn’t stand for research and development, it’s rob and duplicate. Why don’t we use this for our clients? And we put together a plan and it was amazing how well it took off because the nature of EOS is to look at your one year plan and your three year plan and you can actually visually put it in front of clients and get them interested in what the next 12 months will look like.
Andrew:
Like, and they’re buying into a process, not just a one off idea. And it’s changed the way we do recurring revenue.
Lee:
So dude, how do you introduce this to your clients?
Andrew:
Well, it’s really interesting, you know how you go through that typical qualifying process of trying to work out is there a good fit. And for us that starts with a 20 or 30 minute phone call where we can actually outline what Excite Media is capable of doing. But also we’re trying to get a sense of what appetite the customer has to grow their business and to invest in that. But one of the things that we put on the table very early is the idea of them doing a three hour workshop with us. And I really want to sow the seed of this idea that a workshop really is a better get to know your session than a typical sales meeting. We do 60 minute meetings, 90 minute meetings with clients and most of the time you’re actually trying to convince them that you’re a trustworthy person to take on board in their business. But when you go into a workshop now we’re collaboratively working on the problem together and the clients are actually asked to pay a fifteen hundred dollar Australian cost to that. We do give them a money back guarantee if you walk out of this meeting and feel you get no value will give you your money back.
Andrew:
But really at the other side of it, we’re able to present them with a 12 month roadmap to their digital marketing. It may or may not include a website. It talks about a base level of recurring revenue that we expect that month in, a month out they’re going to do with us.
Lee:
Yeah.
Andrew:
And then you may have heard of Stephen Covey, the what is it now? The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People author.
Lee:
Yes.
Andrew:
He has a brilliant illustration talking about when you’re organising your life, you’ve got to get the rocks in first and if not you can’t fit the big things into your life later on. Well, we talk about that and we actually have giant jars in our workshop room that show the rocks, then the pebbles and the sand where you’re fitting everything in. And we talk to the clients about if you come up with an idea, that’s a rock. And we might do some rocks this quarter, but if we can’t fit them into this quarter, we’ll put that rock into the next quarter. And suddenly the client starting to plan ahead and that’s what’s just starting to happen. They’re buying into the idea that they know where the website fits in, they know where the digital marketing fits in and they’re thinking that they are going to be partnering with you out of this worksh into the next 12 months. It’s brilliant.
Lee:
That’s awesome. That kind of avoids as well, doesn’t it? That hey, let’s just quickly build a website for you. Okay, here’s your website. And now who do I fill in? Who do I find next? That kind of whole feast and famine process. Whereas this, you’re actually entering into a long term, 12 month relationship with people and you’ve got the next four quarters to cover. I love how you’re moving rocks into different sections as well. I mean I had some advice the other day on Facebook marketing and I was like, well how do I market it? The event and, and the chap it was actually Dave Toomey was explaining how we first of all need to spend a month building up our pixel of new people as opposed to the existing audience that we already have. And we were going through and we created a whole plan for month one and then we created a plan for month two, you know, to educate those, the new audience and then in month three to encourage the new audience to actually purchase the tickets themselves. So month three is about to start, but without understanding that without going through that workshop with Dave, I had no clue what to do.
Lee:
And you describing those rocks very much reminded me of that process. I knew that for the next three months, exactly what I was doing. And I wanted to work with Dave because he’d helped make that happen. So I’m assuming you never get asked for a refund and everybody then just engages them with you for the next 12 months.
Andrew:
Listen, in all honesty, there’s been a couple of occasions where the workshop has also qualified that the client wasn’t in the right space to actually commit to that 12 month programme. And, you know, we’re not going to be precious about it. If a refund is requested, we’ll give it, but we’d rather get out early than have to fight for their business for the next 12 months. The people who do come out of it and say, I got something out of it and I understand it, you get the sense that they are both mentally committed to the process as well as financially.
Lee:
Absolutely. And they’re bought in as well because they’ve been a part of that, haven’t they? During that three hour, you sent me your WebIQ evolution chart that people are going to be able to get access to as well. You’ve got your three hour. This is the discovery point where you’re doing the positioning, target market and those rocks and deliverables, et cetera. So that’s that process.
Andrew:
Yeah, and we called it WebIQ evolution because WebIQ version two didn’t sound as sexy.
Lee:
It also reminds me of Web 2.0.
Andrew:
Yes, exactly.
Lee:
Which is not cool anymore.
Andrew:
No, go on.
Lee:
And I still see it in contracts sometimes. And you’ll make sure you provide us with web 2.0. So you’ve done your session here. This is like the workshop and you’ve created that plan together. How do you guys go about quoting, quoting for all of that, and then getting the client to kind of engage with you for those 12 months? Do you quote the whole year in advance or do you attack things kind of in stages alongside the plan you’ve already created?
Andrew:
Yeah, with most of the clients, it’s fair to say that they’re only aware of the immediate problems. You know, the website is the sore thumb that I need to solve. For a few clients, they are looking a little bit further out, but generally we have a really clear process that comes out of the workshop. The first thing that happens after a workshop is that within a few hours they actually are getting a PDF document with photos of all of the whiteboards that we created in that workshop room. So we don’t use PowerPoint presentations. We have a massive whiteboard. It’s one of those ones that can turn around Tracy, who’s our head of marketing, actually visually writes down all of the ideas. So we’ve got the brainstorming, we’ve got the process, we’ve got the things that we’re committed to are all being recorded in those whiteboards. And then the client gets them within a few hours of the workshop. So they immediately feeling they’re tied into something that’s exciting and we’re not going to lose momentum. The next thing that happens behind the scenes is that Tracy will meet with our team, our digital specialists, our planner, and actually say what can we do for this client?
Andrew:
What in essence is the core essentials that they need, which will form the base. And that might be 3, 5, $10,000 a month, just depending on the size of the client, size of the project. But that’s what we would hope that month in and month out remains consistent coming back from there. They look at essentially the next 90 days as being the first quarter. What are the rocks that we’ve identified are clear prior. They may include a sales landing page, it might be an EDM newsletter that needs to be set up. Things that are short term but are going to add to the overall equation. Those are put into a 12 month roadmap. We present back to the client, showing who their audience is, what the service offering is, what the USP is that makes their business unique in the market and basically say, are you committed to buy into this process? Is this clearly identifying what the solution could be if they say yes to that? And we actually follow a guy called Blair Enns who has a sales process called Win Without Pitching and we try to get that roadmap in front of the client and talk to them about it over the phone.
Andrew:
And based on their verbal yes, you’ve nailed it. We then follow it up with a written proposal that they can sign off to move forward on.
Lee:
That’s absolutely fantastic. With regards to the chap, Win without Pitching, can you just explain that in a little more detail?
Andrew:
It is really worth checking out because so many of us are used to creating sales proposals that are just what we think the client wants and we’ve do it in line items, we might have guilty as judge packaged it all together. It’s like a confessional, isn’t it? But we’ll work through that. But when you get to the end, you’ve really, you’re hoping that you have read the client’s mind. But in Doing that, you may have undersold or oversold them, and you’re left with nowhere to go except for them to say yes or no.
Lee:
Yeah.
Andrew:
Blair Enns has win without pitching, which has been going, I believe, since about 2004. He runs sales, coaching and all this kind of thing. But one of the interesting things that he does is very early on in the sales process, he tries to anchor the client with an extremely high value proposition. One to see how they’re going to react to it, but also to show the client that there is potential beyond what they currently think they should spend on their marketing. And one of the ideas that you can go through, whether it’s in person, remote sales, or out of a meeting, is that rather than giving the client one price, you can actually give them three prices. One that’s anchored high, one that’s probably very much in line with where you’re interpreting the clients at, and one that gives them a budget out if they want to sacrifice all and not do a good job. And then out of that process, it’s up to you to show the client the value in moving up the scale and actually being willing to invest in their business. The thing we lose sight of is that when you’re selling a website to somebody, they probably do this every three to five years, not every week.
Andrew:
So they’ve lost sight of what the market is. They’ve lost sight of what their business priorities are. And sometimes they’re pulling figures out of thin air. It’s our job to educate them on the possibilities.
Lee:
Absolutely. Win without pitching, folks. I’ve just Googled it as well. Win without pitching dot com. You can grab that there. That’s going next on my list. My list to read. When you were saying that bullet point, I literally did a proposal the other day where I’m thinking, have I? Absolutely have. I captured everything they told me about what’s the easiest way to do this, and I literally wrote a bullet list because I was just so exhausted.
Andrew:
You want another idea to chuck into that process?
Lee:
Yeah.
Andrew:
The whole idea of good sales these days is not trying to have the best proposal. It’s in disrupting the sales process. So you seem like a unique offer. So often we think as long as my proposal lines up with what the client wants and they line them up and one’s four grand, one’s six grand, one’s eight grand, they’ll choose mine because it’s four. But if you can disrupt the process and get the client to come in for a workshop, they’re more committed to you. Without price being mentioned. If you can tell the client that the way in which you assess their needs is uniquely different than just putting prices up against others, they want to listen. And if they do want to listen, then they’re more emotionally buying into being a long term client with you. So essentially both a qualifying process and it makes you stand out from all the other crowds that are just doing requests for quote 3 quotes please, end of story.
Lee:
Yeah, and like you said with the qualifying process, that’s for both. The client gets to work with you a bit and gets to decide whether or not they like you. And equally, you guys can work out whether these clients are going to be a good fit as well. Because not everybody in the world, it’s just like girlfriends and boyfriends and all that sort of stuff in the future, isn’t it? Not everyone’s going to be the perfect fit and you’re going to have to kiss a few frogs until you find the right one. So this sounds like a great process. Now, as part of that process, obviously we’ve talked about getting started, you’ve done your workshop, we’re onboarding them, we’ve put our rocks over the next few quarters and we’re tackling the first rocks now, etc. I guess I’ve got two main questions here. So how do you track kind of the return on investment for your client? Do they get the results and all that sort of things? And also how do you keep that process going? Because we’ve only talked about the first 12 months. Is this something that you can repeat and keep them as a long term client?
Andrew:
Let’s cover the first one first. Obviously trying to identify clear KPIs is important, but one of the struggles that we find pre doing the workshop process is that the clients didn’t either have enough time or enough knowledge to actually tell you what their benchmarks are. You know, where are they today, what traffic equals what leads? And we found that the workshop actually slows things down enough that they’re able to think we can get more out of them in terms of intelligent information. Obviously every client’s different from B2C to B2B. But what we try to do is take a look at the metrics on a quarterly basis looking at leads that are generated. A good example, we’re working with a 13 child care group. So there’s different 13 different locations and they look at what they call a utilisation rate of, you know, what capacity of childcare that they have. And so we’re constantly looking at the metrics of how full each of the locations are and communicating with the client. When it comes to doing the digital metrics, we tend to work on getting the data out of the various sources and compiling a personalised report in Google Data Studio.
Andrew:
And that seems to allow the client to have a sense that we’ve got our finger on the pulse. Another thing that we’ve done recently, and this is a everything’s changing, nothing is rock solid, perfect and working. We’re constantly having to ask ourselves, should we improve? Could we improve? And one thing we’ve been proving over the last little while is that we’ve moved from a Kanban product that we were using previously to using a new product on the market called airtable. It’s new to some anyway, and airtable actually combines kind of like spreadsheets, reporting and database into a product that you can actually have an internal view for your staff, but you can also have a filtered view that’s given to the clients. And we’re using airtable for the wip, the work in progress that the client can see and that’s holding us accountable to them and vice versa. It’s brilliant.
Lee:
That’s awesome. Airtable. Just Google that as well. Airtable.com folks, if you want to cheque that one out. A few of the screenshots look incredible as well, so I’ll be checking that out for sure. Spreadsheets on steroids.
Andrew:
Exactly that. And it’s the good thing is you don’t need programming knowledge to be able to do it. So even I. Oh, that’s cool.
Lee:
And it looks really nice. Just it looks pretty. I like that. I am a sucker for a really well designed website. And airtable.com looks like a really well designed website with that kind of blobby kind of look that seems to be really popular at the moment that everyone’s doing. But anyway, moving on. All right, so that kind of. So you’ve got all this way of tracking, you’re giving the client confidence, etc. This is helping you guys see that what you’re doing is working for the client, et cetera. So you’ve always got your finger on the pulse. Do you do these regular workshops? Kind of. Do you repeat the evolution process at the end of the year or is that something that you can do to keep going on beyond the initial 12 month plan?
Andrew:
So the quarterly cheque ins or pulse meetings are really to find out whether we’re on track with the metrics. But coming back to the annual meeting, the idea then is to really reset what is the vision for the business. It’s an opportunity for the business owner or the chief marketing officer, whoever is kind of that stakeholder represented at the meeting, to tell us whether the business is actually pivoting or staying the course. And from there we can reset and do the next 12 months. So it is an opportunity to kind of throw everything up in the air and say, is it still going to land the same way? And I think the typical cheque in meeting at a quarter, it can be done by phone, it can be done in a meeting, but it doesn’t need to really be more than an hour because you’ve been keeping the client up to date through your airtable, through your KPIs in Google data studio. But when it comes back to the annual meeting, that’s probably going to be something more close to a two hour meeting where you’re really going to ask the questions of is this doing what we want it to do to achieve the same goals and reset the programme again?
Lee:
I think what I like. Well, I know what I like about this as well. As you guys are having those regular communications, it’s very common for us as web developers, designers, et cetera, to do the initial project and then we don’t talk to our client for months and then lo and behold, they’ve given all this work out to other people, etc. Whereas this model that you guys are adopting means you are regularly communicating with the client, you’re giving them information, you’re having these cheque ins as well. But with regards to these cheque ins, you’ve already been giving them information and having conversations with them, even in between those quarterly cheque ins. So there’s this constant flow of information and this constant ability to build and build and build on the relationships that you’ve got. So I just think this is absolutely beautiful.
Andrew:
You’re so right. Because you know what the story is, we actually wish that our clients were more disciplined so we want to hold them to account, but the reality is we need to be accountable as well. So having a process like, like this keeps us with our nose to the grindstone and following the path. Otherwise you think that the client’s quiet and all is good, but as you say, because you’re not communicating to them, they’ve decided to go and get a few fresh ideas from another agency and suddenly you’re losing them. So it is important to keep that communication touch point all the way through.
Lee:
Now, you have agreed to give us some nice documentation for all of this so that other agencies can review your model. And try and adopt it for themselves. How can they get access to.
Andrew:
Yeah, we’re putting together a special [email protected]/atb so for the agency Trailblazer podcast. So if you go to excite media.com ATB we’ll have a post, we’ll have links to information about the EOS traction system and we’ll include a few downloads, including the visuals that we have for our clients that show them the process of how we work with WebIQ.
Lee:
That’s absolutely incredible, mate. I really, really appreciate the time you, you’ve taken to share this with us. This is really phenomenal. I’m excited for people to download the content that you guys have for them and to be able to try and follow this process as well. And I’m actually excited for me to try some of these processes as well because I’ve got something similar going on with a few clients, but it’s not necessarily as well documented as what you guys have got. And the one thing that we, we kind of do, we do something similar with regards to your rocks. We call them sprints and phases. But I’ve never, we’ve never quite. I don’t think we’ve ever quite been able to explain those well enough to our clients when we’re doing that kind of month or 24 month planning process. So I’m looking forward to consuming that information and becoming a legend for my clients. So how can people connect with you, buddy? And then we shall say goodbye.
Andrew:
Well, I think there’s one important thing that we just need to take stock of. You haven’t asked me my favourite drink.
Lee:
Oh my gosh.
Andrew:
We can’t end the podcast without this information, shall I guess.
Lee:
Right, so you live in Australia. It’s definitely not Fosters.
Andrew:
No Fosters. We don’t even know it exists over here.
Lee:
Exactly. I learned this from many Australians because here in the UK they keep telling us that that’s he who thinks Australian drinks Australian. Well, if you’re looking at apparently Fosters. Yep.
Andrew:
There’s a lovely Tasmanian drop called James Bogues. So beers is James Bogues, but I love a Cointreau over ice.
Lee:
Can you just say that again? Because with your accent that sounded beautiful.
Andrew:
I love a Cointreau over rice.
Lee:
Okay, that’s going to now become my ringtone.
Andrew:
Hilarious.
Lee:
Quantro over ice.
Lee:
There you go.
Andrew:
Not quite a Clooneyism, but there you go. Listen, if anybody would like to touch base, the easiest way is on Facebook. Go to facebook.com/theandrewpitchford from there you’ll be able to link to my Instagram, my Twitter. Twitter’s digital pitchy. And you’ll obviously find me on the excitemedia website. Go to our team page and have a laugh.
Lee:
Yeah, that’s a brilliant team page. And also actually cheque out the folio page as well. I really like how on the little grid of websites that you can actually scroll up and down the entire screenshot. So whoever did that in your company, just give them a little round of applause from me, will you, mate? Because I absolutely love that concept. I can actually see the entire design that you’ve done for the client by scrolling over those thumbnails. I thought that was a nice, cool move. I’ve not seen that done before.
Andrew:
We’ll pass it on. Ben Maynard is our creative director and an absolute genius. Genius behind the stylus.
Lee:
Yeah. Brilliant. Well, that’s. That’s a good move. And totally gonna steal that at some point. All right, dude, thank you so much. Have a wonderful evening and enjoy your quantro over us.
Lee:
And that wraps up today’s show. Now, don’t forget, if you want to get access to that workflow process and.
Lee:
All of the documentation that Andrew mentioned.
Lee:
Today, then head on over to excitemedia.com au a that’s excitemedia.com.au /atb. Brilliant episode. I’m hoping we can have him on again soon. Full of value, folks. If you are not coming to the Agency Transformation Live event, then please cheque that out over on Agency Transformation Live. And if we don’t see you there.
Lee:
We shall certainly see you in next week’s episode.
