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How do world-class agencies continue to grow profitably and hit their goals, even through the choppy waters and challenges of agency life?
How do leaders like Tiffany Sauder, Marcus Sheridan, Jay Acunzo, Shama Hyder, David C. Baker, Nikole Rose, and Zeb Evans think?
Join Agency Journey host Jakub Grajcar as he interviews agency operators and leaders to share insights, actionable tips, and hilarious stories from the builders who live in the agency trenches.
Each episode focuses on crucial aspects of growing an agency like building the right team, delegation, project management, client success and retention, and operating frameworks like EOS.
Brought to you by ZenPilot: we help lead your agency through the final project management implementation you’ll ever need. Book a call to learn more at ZenPilot.com/Call.
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00:00
All right, welcome back to Agency Journey. This is Gray MacKenzie from ZenPilot. And this week, I've got the pleasure of bringing on Misti Ferris, who is the integrator, also known as the vice president of operations. But in the theme of this conversation, we're going to be talking about your role, Misty, as integrator at a cool agency called Roger West Creative and Code. Welcome to the podcast. I'm super excited for this. Thanks, Gray. It's really nice of you to invite me. I'm super excited to talk about all things EOS and marketing in general.
00:29
Well, you've got even more than just the EOS side. Like we've got a bunch to dig into. You put in like the podcast intake form that we have, talked about your 3M mantra. What is the 3M mantra? So for me, it is always first and foremost, I'm a mom of four daughters and I've been a mom for a lot of years now, we'll say almost a century. And I just...
00:58
I feel like there's a talent and a patience level that you gain from being a parent that is beneficial to working with people and business people. So that one sticks with me. I know some industries and then some centuries ago maybe being a mom wasn't something that was super valued at the workplace. But I think that...
01:24
The longer time goes on, there really are some super parallel benefits to running a business and raising good humans. So that's the first M. And then there's minimalism. I try to do the most I can, but the least amount of resources and keep things super simple in life and in marketing and in making sure that the people around me are happy at home and at work. So that seems to be the quickest route to get that result.
01:53
And then there is marketing. That is my true passion. I really am enthused when I get to help other businesses grow. That's part and by. I came to Roger West is that it had tons of potential, along with a great track record of building their business on their own. But they were at a pivotal moment where they could decide, no, is this good enough for us, or do we really want to shoot for the moon?
02:20
And that really attracts me to anything in life. But raising kids or making people happy is okay enough? Or do you want to just keep holding on to that? Yeah. That's where it really comes from. That's awesome. So I've got four kids as well, for a similar age range as my oldest is seven, youngest is turning two tomorrow. But I've got two and two. What's the experience like having four girls?
02:51
It is interesting. There's a lot of girly stuff that happens. I'm very fortunate that they're super well-rounded and I only get a lot of drama for maybe one and a half of them and then I get the more down-to-earth and practical stuff from the rest. So I think there's a good balance. But if I had four that were more of the stereotypical dramatic girl.
03:20
that would probably be a little talk for me. And I do, I did have two at the same time that were teenagers and that's a lot of work. Yeah, that's true. That's true. That's, you got to tell them, oh man, that's awesome. Well, a lot of those skills, managing all of that, some of the best teammates that I have now are moms who are, I don't know, they're balancing and juggling and all, but they're excellent at it, which is super cool.
03:49
And I think sometimes, even as I say that, I think sometimes there's a whole bunch of transferable skills between the two. I think sometimes it's easy to say that and say, hey, time management and organization, those are the kind of the, I don't know if stereotypicals are right or, but those are the ones that I think that are easy to recognize and skip out on a lot of. And being a parent is a ton of leadership. You were tested as a leader so much.
04:15
And I think that's one of, I mean, there's a million different transferable skills, but that's one of the skills that nobody really, I always, I hear very rarely talked about as coming from being a mom or being a parent to the workplace. I think that's the piece that I take with me the most, especially right now where I am in my role with us implementing a new EOS structure and growing people into their own leadership roles so that we can grow the company. You have to be a really good leader on your own.
04:43
And that means at the heart, you have to care about the people and you have to have what's best for them at the heart of everything that you do, all the decisions that you make. And that is a skill I learned a long time ago for parenting. I can't always say yes to every single thing, but I can explain what the benefits are around the decision and why it's being made. And it really does help you be more...
05:09
personable and make people aware that you care. And that's why you're pushing for whatever you're pushing for, whether it's to correct a behavior or if it's to promote something, you know, to push a little bit harder. I often get the kids asking me, well, why are you so tough on me about this? And well, it's important because there's a conversation that happens after that. And then they get it. And then the next thing you know, you know, not without struggle, but the next thing you know, you know, they're working and making success towards that.
05:39
definitely translates into growing leaders on a team as well. Yeah. Listen, let's dig into the agency a little bit. So, Roger West, who do you serve and how do you help them? So we serve enterprise-level clients, small and medium-sized businesses as well. And we're looking for clients who are in multiple industries, but we do have the most expertise when it comes to.
06:08
restaurant, healthcare, logistics, and tech spaces. We're looking for clients who are in high growth mode and who really value the expertise that an agency can bring and are really looking for someone to just, here's my list of marketing deliverables that I need. I need someone to just crank them out in a production line. We are a production-based company. We do that, but we're also, we lead from a point of strategy and holistic view.
06:36
Those are the customers that we serve, and we stay very busy trying to keep up with that. Because when they're in high-growth mode, they need a lot of help and a lot of support, and that's what makes us thrive. When you start with strategy, is that part of a longer retainer or a larger project, or is that its own separate piece of the engagement? Yeah, we do both. We see the most benefit when we're able to build a long-term relationship with a client.
07:04
We have multiple clients for more over five years. We have some as many as over a decade. And when you get to that point in a relationship with a client, you've really built a level of trust that you're basically an internal part of their team at that level. But even at a project, someone's coming to us for a one-off project, we're happy to take that on. We just build into that project timeline enough time to really understand their business.
07:33
And not just from our point of view, but from their point of view as well. So there's a lot of uptime, front time around discovery and really getting into their heads. We're always looking for people who have the capacity to partner with us, that are the clients that we serve the best. If it's someone that's just looking, hey, you know, I've got X, Y, and Z to do, and I want you to figure it all out, we can and we have. But usually what is the end result of that is something that
08:01
Well, if we had known you were going to do this, we would have told you about this other type of service we have, or persona we see as a server, whatever. And there's always just that missing element that could have made the effort that much better. So we put in a lot of effort into putting that strategy in upfront, but also bringing the clients around to understanding the value of that upfront time that they're investing into the project. Yeah, that makes sense.
08:28
And what does, for context on the team, as we're talking about the EOS journey and internal ops, what's the team size and is it all remote, all in person, hybrid, what's the structure? That's my favorite part of Roger West. We are at 25 teammates now, full time. We do have an official hybrid structure, but we are mostly in person. People like to get in here and work together. I know that's a weird.
08:56
you know, hot topic right now, we'll come back for the culture, and then you come back and it's a little cubicle. Router West is not like that. Today we have mimosas and homemade omelets by our CEO. And that's us all. And we really do put a lot of focus on enjoying each other as people. And that we do have, we have all sorts of departments internally. So one of those 25 people, we've got a development team full of.
09:25
years and years of experience at design. We've got a content strategy team. We've got, you know, our client experience team. I'm missing something, I'm sure. We've got all the services that we provide, our in-house, whole digital paid media services, all combined under two
09:47
But it's all, we all work together on a daily basis. It's really weird the types of things that you miss. Again, that little piece of missing information that may not have come up when you can actually kind of hear what's going on. Oh, there's a meeting going on over here. I walked back as I went in to get some, you know, whatever coffee or swag for somebody I was mailing out or whatever. And you're like, oh, I just heard about this going on for this client. Have you talked to, you know, this other person over here? And just the collaboration that you miss.
10:16
there's something to be said for that. We were full-time in office before COVID. And then of course, when COVID hit, we had to everybody shut down and we sent everybody home. So we had to learn how to be a full-time remote agency during that time. And what we found is that our whole mission, everything that we do at Roger West is to make our clients look and feel good. You will hear that a hundred times if you're ever in a Roger West office. And the piece that we lost during COVID was really our
10:45
ability to know that that was happening. You thought, okay, we did pretty good, but you just weren't sure which pieces were missing out. You know, what we could have done that little bit of extra to give the project or, you know, the campaign a little bit of something extra that would have really made the client look like a super superstar to their team, you know, because that's really what we strive for. We want everybody that we work with to go back to their board.
11:12
or their leadership at their company, and they're looking at them like, oh, this is our marketing guy. How do they pull out this crazy results? Whether they give Roger West a credit or not is up to them. It's really them. Like I said, we partner with them to make them be able to succeed in whatever their goals are. Yeah, that's awesome. So with the entrepreneurial operating system, how did you find out about it? What's the story or what's the journey?
11:40
So Roger West found out about the EOS operating system. Our CEO hangs out with a bunch of other CEOs and lots of different networking type groups. And of course, some of them had heard of it. A couple of them were operating on it. Just some struggles that he had for running a business for 13 years and starting to see the same patterns of it happening over and over. EOS talks about hitting the ceiling.
12:07
And he was identifying that and so he thought, well, I've been trying it my own way. Let me take some advice for some of the other people who have gone and take things a step further. And so he tried EOS. He brought it to the leadership team. And we did our research and we spent about actually maybe like seven months just at the leadership team level, which I realized that was a really long time, especially in a marketing agency. It's a long time for anything.
12:35
But we spent that time just trying to operate on it as a leadership team to vet it because we are a creative agency. And we, like I said, we've got a full team here of people who really like to be able to write the way they want to write and build code the way that they know is the best way to do it and design standards that they've been, you know, holding themselves accountable to for decades, you know. So we didn't want to put something in place that we thought would stifle creativity.
13:04
And so when we were looking for an operating system, that was our limit test. And so if we couldn't run on it as a leadership team and still be able to be the people that we are and not be held hostage by a bunch of rules or something like that, then we weren't willing to roll it out company-wide. But successfully, we were able to come to the decision that, yep, this can work for a creative agency. And we rung it out to the team in January of last year.
13:33
So we were coming up on one year with the full team rollout, and we were doing better than we ever had before. So this year, just this month actually, we won Small Business of the Year. And a lot of that is aligned with the discipline and the accountability that we've been able to put in place along with measuring success. We were able to translate that into some other ways where we're being recognized for that as well. That's awesome.
14:02
Was it replacing any standardized system? I was gonna say there's a bunch of pieces there, but. Yeah, we definitely, that's our biggest pain point, is there was no standard way of doing anything. And I think that came along with bucking a bunch of creative people into one work area. Everybody just kind of figured it out. We've got a really strong team of people who definitely can and will figure it out if there's no way of doing it. So, you know, that's what.
14:32
built Roger West is people deciding that, okay, this needs to be done. I'm going to find a way to get it done. But in order to scale, you have to take that responsibility off of those people, let them focus their, their, get it done, you know, that need, that need for them to be, you know, really, really good at something, let them focus that through their skill and not on building your business. And that's, that's been the best part for us, I think, is being able to say, well,
15:00
I don't have to expect this guy to just figure it out. Here's what we think needs to happen. Here's your guardrails, and you tell me if it doesn't work, and we'll work together to get it aligned with what you need. But we definitely didn't have anything in place before EOS. And so we saw some immediate improvements just for that alone. That's awesome. So I'm assuming prior to that, prior to rolling it out in January, you'd gone through your vision building days. You'd already done that as a little chit-chat.
15:28
So then rolling out, do you remember rolling out the VTO to the team and sending that through your picture and saying, hey, here's where we're going, or the 10-year vision, or whatever, you know, whatever your long-term target is. How was that received originally? Was it, were there any surprises or like good, bad, ugly? What was that? That was a good day. People were kind of shocked to know that we were sharing these big aspirational goals.
15:55
I think some members of the team had maybe heard, you know, maybe the CEO might have mentioned something about how they want to grow over a certain amount of time in a casual conversation here or there, but certainly as a group and most of the people on the team had never heard anything like that about what is this company doing. And one of the processes that we quickly changed because of EOS was our recruiting and onboarding process.
16:22
And that's the thing that we've most consistently, so that one's been in place the longest of why I mentioned it, but most consistent feedback around that, since that's been in place, is that I'm really surprised, from all running members, I'm really surprised that you guys share so much information about this. And what if you don't hit the goal? Aren't you worried about that? And my answer is no. We don't put goals out there because we think we might hit them.
16:48
We put goals out there because we expect to hit them. And if we don't hit them, we've got to pivot. We've got to make things better really quickly because failing is really not an option for us. Yeah. How about what's been the most challenging or the piece of the entrepreneurial operating system that have been the hardest to make work in the Roger West environment? I think.
17:14
I am the type of person who really loves process and organization. So for me, it's hard to relate to what was the hardest part. So I'm just going to have to lean on some of the things that I've heard from some other people. And I do know the thing that when we first had everybody read What the Heck is EOS, that's one of the suggested steps when you roll it out. That's everybody's first rock is to read that very simplistic What the Heck is EOS first
17:40
first guide there and one of the questions that we got the most around after people were concluding with that, what's this people analyzer about? How do I stack up on that? Because the book tells them to ask, like, hey, your leaders are talking about these things with you, about you, ask for that feedback if you haven't already heard it. And so people were, I think, the name of it?
18:04
actually it puts a little bit of pressure on it. Nobody wants to be analyzed as a person. Like that doesn't feel great. So if I had any feedback for EOS directly, I think I would tell them, as a branding company, I'd be like, listen, your brand could benefit from a few different positioning angles. Outside of that, once we explain to people what the People Analyzer was meant to do,
18:30
And we actually started calling it our core values and GWC assessment instead of calling it our people analyzer. And it seems to be a welcome addition now. But in the beginning, I do know that there was a little bit of just the unknown was there. And it didn't sound like something that they wanted to be a part of. So that took a little bit of time to understand and understand why we were doing it, what the benefit could be, and what they could expect of it. Yeah, that's funny.
19:00
I forget to ask this question. Are you working with a professional implementer or are you self-implemented? Yeah, no, we are working with a professional implementer. His name is Ross Gibbs and he is out of Fort Myers area and Big shout out to him for putting up with us because we yeah You know we put him through the test That's awesome. How is the experience? I had some conversations with folks around rolling out the quarterly conversations or the five five five
19:29
How is, and having bidirectional evaluations or whatever you, whatever we call that, from manager to their, yeah, to the employee versus individual contributor to the manager, how has that rollout been and how has that been received by the team? And also, was that replacing? Did you have weekly or bi-weekly one-on-ones previously that that replaced or did you keep those? What's been the dynamic around those? So prior to the...
19:56
the feedback section from EOS, we really didn't have anything formal in place. We did have some employees who really thrived on feedback, so they would say to their manager, like, okay, I want to know how this is going. In my case specifically, I was like, I'm doing my review if you're not going to do it. I came up with a review process, reviewed myself, and I don't know, I think I came up with a C minus or something overall. It was just horrible. And my boss was like, that's...
20:26
that's not at all accurate, you're being too hard on yourself, but I needed something and there really wasn't here anything in place. And so it didn't replace anything formalized, but there were some people who were really into trying to gain that feedback. So we've given them a vehicle to do that now. And then as far as how's it going with that two-way street that we're creating, where our teammates are allowed to assess and give the feedback to their team lead, how are they doing as a big part of that conversation.
20:56
That's a part that we're still really trying to encourage. I think our new people leaders have done a really great job diving into the one-on-one conversations and making sure that they're really, by nature, care about their teens already. So they wanna know, like, hey, is everything going okay for you? What could be better? Here's some things that we can work on together. All of those conversations are happening in depth. And I've been super, I often say that my little organized heart, you know.
21:25
It's all a flutter when those types of things happen. But as far as the team really giving the feedback to their team leads, I feel like there's still a little bit of room to grow there. Because it's just, if you haven't done it before, I guess it can be a little bit daunting if you're not sure how that person might take it, or you don't want to maybe be seen as someone who's.
21:51
stepping beyond their bounds or something. And so I think we still have a little bit of room to improve around that, to really make people understand that it's okay. Like whatever your feedback is, it's super valuable because that's gonna make us operate better as a team. I'm excited to see how that grows now that people have had the chance to really, like I said, we're almost a year into it. So we're getting closer to that and I'm excited about it. Right. 25 people full-time in the office.
22:21
What's the size of the leadership team? We have six people on our leadership team. We've talked about whether or not that should be condensed a little bit, because it is a little heavy. So I think there is a plan in place as we grow for that to be condensed just a little bit. But we do have a large number of people here at Roger West who've just been here for a few weeks.
22:48
super long time, eight, nine, 12, and even 15 years, as long as the business has been in business. And so when we're going through a change as big as implementing an operating system, it just didn't seem like the right choice to exclude all of the experience and data, the advantage of having them on this team and seeing the things that have been happening for the past 15 years and not gaining something from that.
23:16
We went through the process, actually, our vision building day. After that, we were like, OK, now that that's happened, we can kind of scale back. We got their feedback. And they're super humble. So there were no issues. Nobody throwing a fit, like, oh, I'm not going to be on the leadership team or anything like that. We don't have any kind of dynamics like that here at Roger West. So they're humble, and they're like, OK, I'm going to step out. You guys take it from here. I'm giving you all the feedback that I can think of. And
23:44
We've got a plan and I'm just gonna help carry it out. That's the way to go. And we operated that way for probably until about 83 months ago. We decided like, hey, there are some decisions that we've made along the way that probably could have been better informed if we had these people at the table. So we're testing out a new structure right now that and as you know, with the accountability chart, it's ever evolving. So we're on V2 right now and this version does include a few more people back at the leadership team level.
24:14
That's awesome. It's just super fun for me having this conversation. I just talked with John Heritage from EvenBound, same team size, and just around what their leadership team looks like. Or Paul Erndon, who's at Fuelius, and their little larger team. But just like, I think helpful feedback for people to hear, like, hey, how are agency leadership teams structured, and what's the process been like? One thing I've been asking people as well is around the tooling. Are you running on 9B?
24:43
or using a separate tool to manage EOS? What's been working or not working there? So there were two tools proposed to us by our implementer. It was, I think, Traxia Tools, which has now been renamed, and then IDIO. I did the test for both, went through a couple of demos. I really didn't love them. So again, because I'm organized, I decided to go with a sheer Excel format. Then I just made my own templates for L10s. And
25:11
Rocks and scorecards and all of that kind of stuff. So I went that route for that but then When the EOS one platform beta came out I was invited to that and that one I actually do enjoy quite a bit. We haven't made the tribe So we're using that at the leadership level, but we haven't rolled that out to the whole team yet because we haven't decided Again, you only want to put so much change out there all at once and they're kind of all comfortable with the shared spreadsheets right now So we'll probably probably wait till a little calmer period. Yeah
25:41
put a new platform in the mix. That's cool. That's helpful to know. As we look ahead, we're recording this here at the end of, or near the end, Q4 of 22. What are, what's on your, not just EOS, but kind of agency-wide, like what's on your radar and goals list for 2023? A lot. Some really good stuff.
26:11
mentioned that we met one small business of the year, awarded by the Tampa Bay Chamber, this past month. And we're now able to compete at a national level for a small business. And so we're beginning that journey. And that's something exciting and unknown to us. We've never tipped our toe there. We've got some big client things happening. We've got some clients that are kind of a
26:38
opening up to some new experiences and whether it's service lines or products or people that they serve and are heavily involved in some projects that are really going to change the shape of those businesses. That always amps up our team quite a bit. So we'll see some fun work coming out of that. And then we've also, we're really still, I thought that the leadership team at least, or...
27:06
Maybe the greater team overall would kind of be, quote unquote, over this EOS stuff by now. They'd be like, you know, this isn't really happening, but it's really starting to actually stick now. And so we've got some really big goals to finish up the end of the year and then going into 2023 around documenting our core processes. You know, Roger West is looking to grow from multiple avenues, not just, you know,
27:34
by signing on new clients and doing that, but we've got some other business ventures as well. And I think being able to document everything that we do at a high level, you know, using the EOS process, 80% of the stuff that, you know, creates the biggest impact for us is what we're focusing on. And I think getting that done will throw us over the mark of being able to say, okay, we've got this down to a system now, it's just about making it better.
28:03
And that's been that's my most exciting thing if you had somebody else on this call from the team They probably have a lot of different things. Like I said, I really love process. So yes That's awesome. Was it safe space for processing there too? I mean you're talking about a fellow process there. Um, well, that's awesome uh Other than the website Um rogerwest.com to find a site. Is there anywhere else?
28:30
we should push people to follow you or the agency? We, I mean, there's social channels, I suppose. We're pretty quiet out there. We don't do too much bragging about ourselves. They're awesome. Yeah. Yeah. The website's of course a great resource, but honestly, because we do have pretty cool spaces to hang out, we love having visitors. Yeah. People show up here at the office. We have lots of...
28:59
friends and colleagues that'll use our space for whatever reason they need to use the space for. So if you're ever in the Tampa area, this is the place to hang out. We will definitely make sure you have a good time while you're here. And other than that, I would say just follow us. I mean, we do a lot of LinkedIn, I guess is probably where we're the most active. There's some silly stuff you can follow on like TikTok and all that, but I don't recommend it.
29:29
Yeah, I don't recommend that. Definitely don't clean your room today, actually. It'll be great. That's sort of motivating action. That's awesome. Well, this has been super fun. Misty, thanks for coming on. I really wanted to share your journey and experience with the US as well. Thank you, Gray. It's been a great conversation. I've enjoyed it.