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Agency Forward explores the future of agencies as tech and AI drive down the cost of tactical deliverables. Topics include building competent teams, developing strategic offers, systemizing your business, and more.
New episodes delivered every Tuesday.
Chris DuBois 0:00
Hey everyone, another solo cast coming at you. And I want to kick this one off with a little riddle. What do Sears, Blockbuster, Kodak, Nokia and MySpace have in common?
Well, their cadence was off. Sorry if I jumped to the answer to that riddle a little too fast, but that is what I want to talk about today, your cadence, the three levels of cadence, and why this is important for your agency. Now let's cue the music and actually jump right in you.
All right, so why is cadence so important? First, most businesses have a slow cadence. They can't iterate fast. They can't support their customers fast, and they aren't agile enough to shift with the market. Now, when you're asked, why? Right? The answer, there's probably a bunch of answers and a bunch of things we could get into, but the I would say most of them are just beholden to the spreadsheet, right? They're looking at that the numbers and trying to find the most cost effective way to do every little thing, and they're not actually focused on just how do we move the fastest in order to get results? The challenge with spreadsheets is that they don't give you the full picture, right? You don't get to see some of these human elements for the things that can actually benefit your business and and this is just looking at support right in this instance, but when we even talk about our team and our clients and the results that we're able to get them, all of it boils down to the same thing. Now, in the army, we had a phrase called speed is security. And this is something that was just beat into us,
especially within the infantry, right? It was something that that we had to always pay attention to. The challenge, though, is that speed does not actually equal security, right? What speed does is it removes the number of variables that you have to consider. And so when you're very good at doing something, and you can get after it just the same way, every single time, you don't have to think about certain pieces. So when we do that, and we remove those variables by moving fast now we can get a much quicker result because we just we handled this right. So I mean bringing it back to like a customer support example, the longer that customer has weighed, the angrier they get, the the more other problems start to creep into what they have to deal with in order to make this happen. Whereas if we had just hit it right away and said, Hey, we're this is how we're going to take care of this issue. Right then you wouldn't have that happening.
So what we want to do is create that consistency, couple it with speed, and that is going to give us this immense credibility, which is why I believe that your cadence is your credibility. Okay, to increase cadence, though, we need to minimize the recklessness. So now let's talk the three levels of cadence in business. The first one is your tactical cadence. This refers to how fast you get individual jobs done. It so we're talking client delivery, customer support. That's usually where it's the easiest to see, right? So how different is the experience between a company that leaves you on hold for an hour and then tells you to, like, email a specific department, a verse, the company that answers immediately and resolves your issue before you hang up? Right? That? I mean, that's a huge difference. I wanted to let that one sit for a second. Okay?
The point is that the companies that get the tactical cadence right are thinking about the problem differently, right? Companies that are going to lose are saying like, well, we could probably wait 10 minutes before the customer gets angry, and now that's, you know, some limiting thinking, and shows that you're not customer centric. But the company that says, you know, we know we might not get to everyone right away, but let's do whatever we can to help them as quick as possible, right? Those companies are looking for other solutions, and so if we think like, Zappos is return process, right? I know people who won't shop anywhere else after experiencing like that level of support, and unfortunately, it's just not that common in everything. Now, if we bring this back to the agency world, right? It's the same thing when you're when a client asks a question or sends some concern, if you can get to it right away, or at least even just comment say, Hey, we are working on it.
You know, we'll get back to you shortly. But I wanted to let you know that we have this like that. We are paying attention to this. Right? When you can do that, it shows that you are quickly moving to actually get things done. Uh.
And that goes a long way in building some sport, building some trust and credibility with your clients. Now the next level is operational cadence. This is the speed at which you can handle the inner workings of your business, right? So, like, how fast are items from meetings being actioned after the team gets back to work,
when the team decides on, like, a new campaign or an offer, right? How fast are those assets being created? How quickly are you testing like the messaging to see if that offer even resonates? We want the the norm to become like, I'll have that by end of day, instead of, I'll have that by end of week, right? Just imagine how much different your organization would look and we know like it's hard to do that not everything is going to be so easy to take it down from end to week to end a day, but if you just shift your thinking to that, it's actually a lot more possible on a lot of tasks. A lot of times we'll write things down on like a post it note. It gets pushed off to the side, and then we never get back to it until we need to get back to it when we're trying to close up for the week and we see it. But what if we did that every day and just looked what actions do I need to take right now to be able to maintain that credibility that I'm trying to to keep right, to hold ourselves at a higher standard?
Your operational cadence really dictates how fast you can get a result, and it comes down to the culture that you've established within your your organization, right? There are two primary competitive advantages to to any business. And, like, really, you know, you can say, Oh, we have this technology. We have this but, like, those are not competitive advantages anymore. Someone can recreate that technology much faster, because you just paved the way for them to be able to get there. Okay, your culture is one of those pieces. The second one is the speed at which you take action. And speed, I think, can really go fit into the culture piece, but it's probably important to identify it as a separate element. Okay, when you have those, and you create that strong operational cadence, it's going to sync all of your teams, and everyone gets to start moving more deliberately, and so everything like within the now tactical cadence, right? It's much easier for those to be maintained because all of the pieces at the higher level are being organized.
Okay, so let's quick example right for tactical cadence. We could be referring to how quickly an individual support ticket is managed. Your operational cadence is going to demonstrate how fast action is taken inside the business to document that issue for customers to to tweak parts of the product, you know, if necessary, to disseminate any information about the issue across the team, to make sure everybody's on the same page, right. If you can maintain a fast operational cadence, you become a powerhouse. Now the last one is your strategic cadence. The
this refers to how fast your entire organization can respond to like changing market conditions or any like greater problems and challenges, right? So the companies that I mentioned in the introduction to this, this podcast episode, they all failed at the strategic level. The market was going one direction. They couldn't keep up, and so like for most of those right, they made a bet that the industry wouldn't change. And obviously that didn't pan out.
Jeff Bezos, in a letter to shareholders back in the 1900s
differentiated between type one and type two decisions. Type one decisions are like a one way door, right? You have to it's a very deliberate decision, because once you cross through that door, there's no getting back. It's only it only goes one way. Type two decisions are two way doors, so you can make the decision fast, and then if it's not the right decision, you can just quickly come back from it. So when we look at our strategic cadence, we want to be able to identify, is this a type one or type two decision? Because if it's type two, you need to just move fast, right, rapidly, seek those opportunities like take the chance, even if it's not going to have catastrophic effects, which type two decisions will have way less of a negative impact than a type one. And so
strategically, keep the keep that in mind as you're kind of working your company. Okay, let's get into some some ways that you can improve your cadence and doing some things within your agency so that that you can continuously improve this. Because if it is your credibility, then it really matters that you're able to develop this right now. Number one, you can adopt a mindset that promotes cadence. Right again, it's not just about speed, it's about consistency. So when you take on the mindset that you're going to improve your cadence, you're paying attention to all of the variables that could impact that. Okay, you will always.
Find ways to remove blockers and enhance, like your team's performance. If, if you're paying attention to the cadence, right, if you are seeking this, it's going to start making itself more obvious. It's the reticular activation system, right? When you say, hey, where? When was the last time you saw a yellow car? All of a sudden you're going to see a lot of yellow cars. So you're paying attention to it. And so it's the same, same thing happening here. And next, understand your core numbers. When you know the critical numbers for your business, you're able to track and prioritize around them. Now this doesn't mean to look only at the numbers, but rather have a way to check in on performance. Right? You need to measure something to improve it, but you can't measure it unless it's defined. So define the core numbers and explain why they're important to the business. This is going to help you rank, order the task, to increase your cadence from most impactful to least, okay, and then last you want to find tools to help Okay, once you have the mindset and the skill set, which I'm sure everyone if you're listening to this podcast, you have at some point, heard me talk about the importance of focusing on your mindset first, then developing skills, then looking at tools, right buying that awesome, shiny new tool isn't going to matter if you don't have the skills to use it, and it's not going to matter if you're not thinking about it like incorporating it into your workflow the right way. Okay, so we're going to find some tools. There are, I mean, hundreds of tools out there to help you do things faster. The challenge that many companies face is believing that that tool is going to solve your problem. Okay, so do not fall into that, that challenge, but there are tons of tools that can make all of this happen faster. You can use AI. There are, I mean, it's endless. I'm not going to get into it, so we're
going to wrap up this episode. I really do think your your cadence is your credibility. It is one of the values in my business. It is one of the things that I want to coach all of my clients on, because you can really build trust just by showing up and proving that that you can do this thing, right. Trust is built on predictability. The easier it is for me to predict an outcome, the more likely I am to trust whatever processes bring in that outcome, right? So if I know every time I bring you something, you are going to act a certain way. I'm going to trust that more. That is what we are looking at with building our credibility. Here. We're building trust through predictability, and that's really why I think your cadence is your credibility.
That's the show everyone. You can leave a rating and review, or you can do something that benefits. You click the link in the show notes to subscribe to agency forward on substack, you'll get weekly content resources and links from around the internet to help you drive your agency forward. You
Transcribed by https://otter.ai