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- [00:00]
Kevin Dunn
Hi, everyone. Welcome to agency unfiltered, the HubSpot Solutions Partner Podcast. I'm your host, Kevin Dunn, and Agency Unfiltered is a weekly web series and podcast that interviews the owners, founders and executives of agencies and services providers from around the world about whatever it takes to grow and scale. On this week's episode, we have on Angela Pointon, president of 11 out of 11, who joins us to talk about employee extended leave employee. And she offers tips on how you can plan for things like parental leave without destroying your P and L or your client experience. So Angela walks us through her approach staff wise, both overall for her agency and for leaves when they arise. We talk about how she manages a mix of both full time and contract employees to maintain flexibility, and when, where and how redundancies and coverage models are established. We also talk about how it's handled on the client side, how they're made aware, how the transition is positioned, and how Angela's team mitigates any client concerns or reservations about the change. And lastly, apart from staffing, we hit on the other operational measures and processes that she has put into place to ensure continuous service delivery. This week's episode of the Agency Unfiltered podcast begins right now. Hey, Angela.
- [01:41]
Angela Pointon
Welcome back to the Agency Unfiltered podcast. How are you?
- [01:44]
I am good, Kevin. How are you?
- [01:47]
Not too shabby, not too shabby. What's.
- [01:50]
Kevin Dunn
What's the latest?
- [01:50]
Angela Pointon
I mean, it's probably, I should have probably looked up the date of our, our first episode, but how have things been? I'm assuming in at least, what, a couple years since we last spoke? What's the latest and greatest?
- [02:00]
I think we chatted height of COVID Things have been good. Covid was, you know, obviously from a humanitarian perspective, horrible, but from a business perspective, it was great. We were remote from day one. Didn't miss a beat. Really enjoyed these past couple years and really looking forward to chatting with you again.
- [02:23]
That's great. Well, it's. I'm glad to hear things going well. Glad to have you back on the show, Angela. I'm excited to talk about the discussion at hand here. Obviously, I feel it fairly acutely. I'm smack dab in the middle of some parental leave as well. And so I think you're here to talk about how 11 out of 11, your agency and your team, you know, how you plan for, how you accommodate, how you handle parental leave and maternity leave, extended leave from your staff, but doing so in a way, you know, that doesn't have an adverse effect on you. Know your PNL and the client experience a number of different things and probably something top of mind for a number of our listeners and a number of HubSpot partners. And so maybe the best place to start, let's just contextualize it at the top. Why is having a strategy and a documented process for this so important for partners, services providers, agencies, etc.
- [03:11]
Yeah, anybody who owns an agency knows that hiccups in client service and account management are risky for the client relationship and the contract. Let's be honest with the client. And so, and you know, we've all maybe been in the client's shoes at one point in our career with a service provider or can put ourselves in their shoes. And that, you know, absence of knowledge, it would sucks. Right. And so it's one of the most challenging things I think about being in a business where we're working with people and you know, providing professional services is that continuity, whether it's somebody quitting to leave for a different job or somebody leaving temporarily on maternity or paternity leave or you know, whatever type of leave they need to take for their family. And so I think to do ourselves a service as agency owners, thinking about that, even though it's a crappy thing to think about, thinking about that and strategizing how we can plan for continuity is really smart and worth the time spent.
- [04:24]
Yeah, I like the framing it of just like the importance of continuity for your clients, obviously building up their confidence right in that continuity. And then again parental leave or extended leave, like there's a number of different flavors that can impact the client experience. But again it's continuity. I like that umbrella term. And so how does your agency, how do you, how does your team handle it today? What is like the staffing or you know, what, what does continuity look like, you know, when you're facing a leave?
- [04:54]
Yeah. So One thing about 11 out of 11 for the listeners, we have a blend, a hybrid of part, we're heavily part time team members and some full time. And so that offers us I think a bit of flexibility in non leave times. Right. Of account management and fluidity there.
- [05:19]
But the part times like 1099, like contractors.
- [05:23]
Yep, yep, yep. And so, and we could go into that. That's a whole nother show of why we set that up that way. Yeah, but you know, I'll say I, you know, I used to work for an agency, a pretty large HubSpot agency partner and before starting 11 out of 11 and I had two kids there and my leaves I think were seven months and five months. So pretty extended leaves that I did by choice, you know, unpaid. It was a small agency at the time and the way that it was managed really worked well for me and my family. Paternity leave was a newer thing back then, but my husband and I got to layer so that he had some time, I had some time. And ultimately the child had a lot of time to build that bond with his. We had sons, his parents, so I kind of wanted to bring that forward. And so, you know, individuals at 11 out of 11 have a lot of flexibility with work, life, harmony and what that means to them and how they want to build that, you know, kind of goes to our flexible team model. But with regard to leave and the topic of this show, it very much applies. And so there's no defined leave time period. At 11 out of 11, you know, individuals are empowered to craft what that means for themselves. Yeah, we have a team member right now who just had her first child and is out. And she was a very strong team member here. We were scared to let her go. And so the process started very early for us. And I think that is really critical for those client relationships. We, we work with everybody virtual, but we did have dedicated conversations where we pulled the whole team together with the client and really talked them through our plan for layering people, meaning before so and so leaves. The new team is going to come in. That obviously costs the agency money because you're paying double for account management support, but that's how critical it is. And our layering time period, whenever we can do it, obviously there are emergencies, people have babies earlier than they think. But our ideal layering time period is two months.
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So you bring in the coverage account manager with a two month overlap ahead of that person beginning their formal leave.
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Yeah, correct. Yes. Sometimes even longer than that. Not by much, but there will be some, depending on how complex the person's account load is. Some internal meetings before they ever meet the clients, you know, to just get them up to speed and educated on that as much of the what's in the person's brain and documented. And then two months solid of meetings with the client where they're both on. And that's primarily so that, you know, every single client, as everybody knows, has a different personality, has different idiosyncrasies, they like to approve things one way, they're particular about such and such. And even though we document all of those things, you get to know a client and start figuring out things about them. Not through just one interaction. It has to be multiple and sometimes people miss calls or this team member wasn't able to be on a call from the client. And so that kind of time period we feel like is very fair for both the client and our team. We have gotten feedback from clients recently with this particular team member of how much they appreciated that amount of time. You know, I don't think the money part of it comes to their mind first. They're more thinking about the acclimation time period to. They're all worried too. Right. Is this new team member going to be good? Did they understand? Have they really been brought up to speed? Are they going to totally mess up? And then I'm going to be like, shoot, you know, this great resource is now a crappy resource. What do I do? And so that acclimation period of them getting comfortable is just as important as it is for our team.
- [09:50]
Yep. It's, it's funny like the trust or like a deep relationship, you know, a team member has with a client. It can be a blessing and a curse. Right. Because when it's time for them to go and leave, it's even bigger shoes to have to fill. Right. And it's, you know, a steeper uphill climb, I'm sure, to build that trust on somebody coming in on the interim. And so, yeah, it sounds like having that sort of dedicated overlap, 2 months prolonged helps you, you know, set both sides up for success. Does the client take any, does it change anything about their sorry, cost structure or anything as it relates to, like their engagement with the business when they have two, you know, a double dip of account management resources on your team?
- [10:26]
No, we assume that costs ourselves. It's short term. Right. And yes, it sucks. But we, you know, there's cost, not even just doubling, but all the planning that goes into that. So the management team figuring out, okay, you know, so and so is going on leave. He or she has, let's call it four client accounts. Are they all going to be right for the candidates we've been interviewing or for the team member who has bandwidth? Sometimes it's figuring out, you know, two are going to go to this person, they're going to shine there, two are going to go to this person. And so another great benefit of having a flexible team is you don't always look at, Suzy's got bandwidth. They're all going to Suzy because we, we have no other choice.
- [11:16]
It's not just a singular person that slides in. It's like, oh, let's distribute the client base based on capacity and bandwidth across the team.
- [11:22]
Totally Totally. And we'll explain that to a client. Like we picked Suzy because such and such and such. She has industry background, you know, experience, whatever it might be that helps make them feel comfortable. But no, we don't burn in the client to answer the question with the cost. There is a lot of cost with this layering. Totally worth it for the well being of our people and their families and you know, all that they're investing in that, let's be honest, more important aspect of life than work. So totally worth it. But it is something that we, we swallow, we eat.
- [11:59]
Okay, that's great. You mentioned that. Hey, we can distribute coverage across, you know, multiple team members is just open capacity and bandwidth. Is that the singular most important factor? I think you mentioned too, sometimes we try and find like personality fit or like, you know, industry experience. But like what are the factors that you lean on to help find the right person for the right, you know, client coverage? Right.
- [12:22]
That's probably the trickiest part of all of this. In addition to just timing, working out is trying for us. It's a lot of softer things of trying to figure out who's going to work well with a client. And you know, I know the majority of your listeners are agency owners, so hopefully we can all relate to this. We have some people who are high maintenance, some people who are super easy, walk in the park. Like they would work well with just about anybody who's pleasant and confident and, and people in between both of those extremes. Right. And we put a lot of thought into that. If a team member is, you know, or I should say, if a client really appreciates the relationship, likes to shoot the, at the beginning of a call, we're going to put them with somebody who's very competent at the work but also who enjoys those things. If another client is more like, you know, a D on a disc profile, like they want to get on the call, talk about the hit points that are important to them and hop off five minutes later. That same type of person's not going to be a good fit for that client. That person needs to be on the ball, really brief to the point. So we really think about those types of things as much as possible because they seem to make the most difference in impact of someone being like, I really like Susie. Like I don't know where you found her, but she's a great fit for me and I'm really enjoying working with her. Like there's been no hiccups. We'll hear that often because we carefully considered those softer aspects.
- [14:09]
It's interesting to call out that it's not just the important. I mean, obviously it is important, but it's not, it's not just about finding someone that keeps the trains on schedule, but it's like, no, there's actually, you know, this interpersonal layer that may be in some cases more important to be able to find the right match or the right fit.
- [14:23]
Yeah. And if we try to look at this glass half full, when you have a new client come on board, it's hard to know those things from not knowing them, not having worked with them. During a transition like this, you have the benefit of knowing a little bit more about the client and who they might work with. And sometimes the lead, you know, person who we're often talking about here in this conversation, we can make a better swap there that ends up being permanent. Not because the person on leave doesn't come back, but we put them in a different, you know, with a different client when they come back. We think it's going to be better for them.
- [15:03]
So that's interesting. If things are going just incredibly smooth or even in some cases maybe more smooth than they were, who knows? Like some of these decisions could be viewed as permanent. Right? Yeah, yeah.
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And we like to involve the client in that conversation because we probably in the beginning. Right. It's natural to say so. And so is planning to take a four month leave or three monthly, whatever it is, you know, totally planning on coming back to 11 out of 11. And so that gives them, okay, this is temporary. If I don't like this person temporary. Right. I can deal with it. But if they fall in love with the person, they really enjoy working with them, we can have that open dialogue. Hey, we know so and so is coming back soon. Do you want to keep things as is and not that they're in charge of that decision because obviously that's critical for staffing and resource planning for the agency owner. But if the agency owner is open to having that kind of conversation with the client, I think it's appreciated and really helpful in building that longer term relationship with them.
- [16:03]
Yeah, I like that. I know you alluded or mentioned some of the, the, the unique elements of how you've built your team, but have you ever run into a, a situation where the bandwidth or the capacity across the team wasn't so easily discovered? Right. Or like, you know, how do you, or if so, how did you navigate that? You know what I mean? When again, bandwidth doesn't seem to be found, but obviously, you know, you need it with, with an Upcoming leave.
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Yeah, those events have often come up when leave happened more suddenly than we thought it would.
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Right.
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And so we might have been planning for bandwidth for January, but here we're in October, November, and suddenly like, oh crap, like we gotta really move things along quicker. Everybody has unfortunately been in that situation before and I don't know if it's the nature of having like a heavy part time team, but we have bandwidth conversations. Often one of our core values, we call them things we live by, is own your own work life balance or work life harmony. And so we're often having conversations very openly of like, how's the balance gone? Like, are you feeling like, you know, you're working way more than you want to or know you have bandwidth and you're looking for more work or you know, what's that? What's that? We have that on a monthly basis with our, our contractors and team members. So constantly talking about that. And that gives us a lot, like we keep notes on all of that. That keeps us very much in the know and on the pulse of, you know, this person, just like last week said they were looking for a new client if we have an emergency, like they're going to be our go if it's shorter term to find the right person. And it's a little trickier to do with full time employees, I think. Although you probably could adopt the same type of open dialogue just crafted around work life harmony and just doing a check in of, you know, I mean, we probably all have access to hours, whether they're part time or full time. So we can see right there if they're, you know, 90% billable and they're working 60 hours a week, they're probably not looking for more work. Right, right. But we can still have those open dialogues just to kind of keep our pulse on availability and capacity.
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Yeah, I mean, so it sounds like it's sparked by you know, one of like the cultural tenants at 11 out of 11. But it's, it really comes down to just like, all right, well, resource planning, but just like intentional, consistent conversations about work life balance or plate, you know, how do we mitigate, you know, burnout? How do we just always make sure that there is enough bandwidth distributed across the team to account for these types of situations.
- [19:01]
Yeah, totally. And I will say we're not perfect. And so we have had conversations with team members who told us they had bandwidth but didn't really want to do the work once it fell on their plate. Right. We've all been in those situations. That's another problem to figure out. We did in our past have somebody who took on accounts for a person on leave who then decided to leave the organization. So it was like a replacement. Replacement. Horrible, right? My heart goes out to the clients at that point, just like, I am so sorry, I don't want to be on the podcast pretending we're perfect, but. And. And as much as you try to have transparent, honest conversations with people, at the end of the day, they're looking out for themselves, their families, and what's best for their careers, just like all of us are. So, you know, they're only going to be as honest as they can be. Probably. But we still try. Right. And so not to say that all of that is unavoidable. We've all been in the situation where it's like, oh, my God, what am I going to do? How am I going to fill this resource? But just trying to mitigate that and having, you know, a backlog of who could be available in a case of need or emergency, whatever the case may be.
- [20:34]
Kevin Dunn
How do you.
- [20:35]
Angela Pointon
Whether it was that example of, like, the double ding. Right. The double transition. Or maybe it's just any client that just wasn't super psyched about the, you know, the idea of having somebody new come on board. Like, how do you manage client concerns or reservations as they come up, if they come up, you know, what does that tend to look like?
- [20:52]
Yeah, obviously we can manage it as much as we're able to, Kevin, is what I'd say. So whenever a client just waves the flag and is like, this just is not working. One, I appreciate that waving rather than being like, we just can't work together anymore. Right. So the feedback is very appreciated. And the chance to fix, I always am immensely grateful for. Because not everybody will give you that chance. And so we try to capitalize on that opportunity. And, you know, if we maybe we didn't have as much of a conversation with them on. Right. Fitness when a transition was made, try to revisit that conversation. Be like, okay, we want to do better next time. We also will talk without naming names about team members and what we think their strengths are not. Like, you get to pick who you work with. You know, we will ultimately need. Because we own the resource from a planning perspective, need to make that decision. But we will talk about strengths and things that people are good at to try to get deeper at who they think they're going to enjoy working with. And then it's a collaborative approach at that point. Right. And so they feel a little Bit more invested in that. I think that's a. I mean, it sucks, right. But ultimately a huge win if a client's willing to be open and have that dialogue.
- [22:25]
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think too, just like starting early, getting to what they would find the most value in as from a, you know, a coverage person or like an interim account manager. But it's like, yeah. Getting to the root of what they are looking for and what's going to be successful. I guess if that's happening proactively, hopefully you're mitigating the risk of them being unhappy on the other side of it once that decision is made. Right.
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So hopefully more times than not it works out.
- [22:48]
Right. This is a very idealistic podcast. You know, everything always just goes swimmingly. We know this, we know this. Other than just the actual human staffing component, are there any other considerations or processes or like operational components, like anything else that you have to put into practice to ensure, again, to use your word, like the continuity of these clients experiences with your agency.
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Yeah. Another, I mean, you know, element that goes into this is with human life and new human life. If we're talking about maternity or paternity leave, things can happen that are, you know, needing people's attention longer than they thought they would need or, you know, they're just struggling with whatever they're struggling with as a new adult parent.
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Well, I think similar to your point is sometimes these can happen sooner than anticipated. They can also extend longer than anticipated. Right. In this, in this example.
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Yeah. And that's tricky. So I want to stay away from any kind of employment law and what I'm going to say here, but we're very careful and considerate of. You don't want to talk to me while you're on leave. Like you want to be doing what you want to do and have work be the last thing on your mind, if it's on it at all. And so having a mechanism for having that conversation at some point during the leave is appropriate, I think, and keeps the ability for the agency owner to do that kind of planning. Because, look, we don't want to find out, you know, person was supposed to return Monday and it's Friday and we're finding out they need another four weeks. Totally understand you need another four weeks. Like totally get that emergency aside. Let's have a mechanism for being able to have that dialogue. And we're learning that the hard way. We have had people who've said that they've wanted to take very short, in my personal opinion, leaves where it's like when you get into it, you're gonna think that's such a great idea, but you do you and keep us posted. That's a little too open ended. I'm learning. Rather than hey, you know, that sounds short. Why don't we check in at X week, just have a quick dialogue. You could text me if you want. You know, plans still the same or you know what, let's talk about plans changing, but let's have that so it's not awkward and I'm not just showing up in your inbox with some work related email that you haven't thought about in weeks.
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Right, right. Yeah, it's interesting. It's like, hey, just, you know, quick pulse check, plans remain unchanged or should we talk about, you know, some, some changes to, to, to what we've laid out?
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You got it. You got it.
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But again, it's like how do you toe the line between maintaining lines of communication but also making sure that work is just like they're fully detached from the work itself, knowing that, you know, that's where, that's not where their focus or emphasis should be, that period in their life.
- [25:59]
You know, I don't want to be showing up all of a sudden in somebody's phone like, hey, this conversation is all about me. We need to plan. What are you doing? You know, that's not okay or fair to the person. So planning in advance with the individual before they leave on what the check in is going to be is recommended.
- [26:20]
Yeah, it's a helpful tip. Going back to the part time folks on the team or the contractors, where and how does like employment status come up with the clients? Right. Do they know when they're working with somebody that's full time or when there's a contractor? Is that secretive? Like where, you know, how does that manifest in the conversations you have with.
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Clients, if at all? It's a good question. I'm very open about our team structure. I think it's a benefit one. I think it's very common in marketing agencies.
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Yeah, sure.
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They might not be because they're not in the marketing agency world. They might not know that. Right, the client might not know, but they talk to enough agencies, they'll figure it out pretty quickly. But I also think it's just, you know, again, goes to our culture. I worked full time at an agency, tried to raise two kids, practically killed myself doing it, paid someone else to raise them, in essence, and drove an hour each way every day before pandemic, of course. So I created this agency in this way because I felt like people still wanted to work at an agency like I did, but they didn't want the agency to crush their personal life. And that was kind of the reputation of marketing agencies up until Covid, was you're committed, like, you might be here weekends, like doing design reviews, like you are just committed.
- [27:49]
Long weeks, long nights, you know.
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Yeah, for sure, totally. That was the culture. And when I graduated college, that was expected of you and, you know, it burnt me the heck out. So I wanted to do things differently and give people that opportunity, still be involved in the agency community, still work with clients, but not have to be crushed with it. And so clients seem to appreciate that probably even more post Covid. It was kind of remarkable and unique before. Now it's a little bit more. Yeah, like, totally get it. Like, it's, you know, it's life, work, harmony. Not work, life, harmony anymore. And I think a lot of people have matured in the past few years with that regard. So, yeah, yeah, we're, we're open, transparent. If people got a problem with it, then we're not the agency for them.
- [28:41]
Sure, yeah, that's also a great point. How has the receptiveness or like the reception of your team about, hey, this is how we do it. Here's how we plan early, here's how it goes. Like having this sort of like documented, formalized, like, here's our approach, right? For, for facilitating leave, handling leave. What's the employee feedback been? What's the team feedback been? Have you, you know, absorbed any feedback that has informed how this process has changed over time? But, but what does that look like with the team?
- [29:08]
So we need to get better at this, to be totally vulnerable and honest. We do have in our, all of our agreements now with team members that if there's going to be a change, they need to give us a month's notice. With most leave, we're lucky in that we tend to hire planners anyway, people who are process driven and planning driven. And so we oftentimes will have those conversations early. You know, it's funny, but with a woman that you work with remotely over zoom, you never see her stomach worse in the office.
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Like, sure, yeah, sure.
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So, but, you know, look, husbands and fathers are taking paternity leave now too, which is totally awesome. So we probably need to get better there and being a little bit more proactive of, hey, welcome to the team, and have that as being part of our onboarding process. Just more open dialogue about that because I want people to feel comfortable that they can have this conversation very early and not feel like the agents is going to be planning for me to leave because that's a scary, I think, potentially thought for somebody to have, like, I'm at risk of departing this place and they're just going to want to get rid of me and not deal with it, which couldn't be farther from the truth.
- [30:38]
Yeah. Welcome to the team. All right, let's talk redundancy, you know. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.
- [30:41]
Yes.
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What's the right way? How do you facilitate that dialogue? Obviously sounds like something you're hoping to do better, more consistently, but, like, what does that conversation look like, especially for newer folks on the team?
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Yeah, so we have an onboarding process that we do here, probably much like other companies, and we run through a bunch of stuff that's pertinent right away and pertinent not right away. You know, we obviously talk about like, hey, here's how you go about letting us know if you're going to go on vacation. Right. Normal stuff. You got any vacations coming up? It should be woven into that dialogue. You know, probably not planning on taking a long leave right now, but in the event that you are, here's a high level overview of how that goes down here. And start that conversation, you know, maybe not day one, but week one, and just make it very comfortable or as comfortable as it can be for somebody to feel like if this ever happens. My life during my tenure at 11 out of 11, I at least know that they've got a process around this that I can look up and follow at that time.
- [31:51]
Yep. Nope, that makes sense. And again, I think it puts a little bit of the accountability. It's shared accountability. Right. Say, hey, we owe you and your clients a plan. But then you also owe us, you know, information and context if and when, you know, these things are. Are coming up.
- [32:06]
Absolutely.
- [32:09]
I know we're coming up on time. I want to sneak in another question or two. Hold on one second. I literally just had it.
- [32:17]
It's all good.
- [32:18]
Hold on. I literally just blanked. Oh, I got it.
- [32:22]
Kevin Dunn
There it is.
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Angela Pointon
So if I think about like the evolution of having this sort of like leave coverage process, it probably starts like, well, if I track it around, like agency maturation or business maturation, like, okay, yeah, we don't have anything. And then a situation arises and so we just kind of like ad hoc piece it together and then there's probably a period where it's like, okay, if it went arises just one offs, we'll just solve what's the inflection point in your eyes. And when partners agencies should. Okay, we need a standardized, documented process and it needs to be woven into things like onboarding and et cetera, et cetera. So when does that inflection point happen in your eyes?
- [32:58]
It's a good point. Yes. So we're 20 people now, heavily part time in that group. And I can imagine if I were an agency owner where I worked with three team members, one of which is myself, I might feel like documenting this process is a complete waste of time.
- [33:18]
Like, I don't want to say overkill, but, like, I think I know who's going to step in. I know who's. I know who's. Yeah, put my hat on.
- [33:23]
Yeah, Right. And so for us, I will give a shout out to our client services manager, Kelly Stoner. She is a process God in my eyes. And so anytime anything happens once where she thinks it might repeat itself, we get started on a process, even if it's pretty loose and like a few bullets, we at least next time can like refresh our memories of what happened and what did we do or wish we did. Right. And so I hate process documentation more than anything. I will.
- [34:04]
That's why you hire folks that love that, you know, you're like, I will find someone to do that for me.
- [34:08]
I love the fact that we have built all of our processes and she gets all of the credit for that and then some, but that's the way we roll. So. And it's all credit to her. But if something happens once we develop the process. Yeah, it sucks when we don't have a process and it happens for the first time. But I think for, for most things, until you go through it once, it's really hard to document process of it just out of the blue. I have also leaned on other agency owners. Your podcast is a great example of this, of where people are willing to just articulate the process, even high level. And you might be, oh, I never even thought to do it that way. That's so smart. And so we're trying to do that more and more too. Of like, gosh, we don't have to be the only people who are coming up with this. There's got to be other people who've done this the hard way and learned. And so that's been a great leverage point. You know, reaching out on Slack channels, asking questions like that of other agency owners is helpful.
- [35:17]
Yeah. Not always something that you have to develop from scratch. It's like, how do we look outward to help inform. Right. Something that we want to develop that new as a process. Yeah, for sure. We talked about the two month overlap when a coverage is about to begin. What does the overlap look like on the other side when somebody's looking to ramp back up.
- [35:33]
Yeah. So for bringing somebody back and they are going to re inherit the account, then we would follow a very similar process. However, shorten it a little bit. The person coming back should have had an intimate relationship with the client in the beginning. And so they're not coming in that new like the, you know, they don't.
- [35:56]
Have to like orient to the idiosyncrasies. Right, all right. They come with that existing knowledge. Right? To your point.
- [35:59]
Yeah, yeah. And so it's really about what did they miss? Some team members changed on the client side. You know, they hired somebody, whatever or the work, the projects that we were working on and we work a lot on retainer. And so things do change around month to month. And so there's a reorientation period when someone comes back. And then we oftentimes put it in that returning person's mind to be like, yeah, I'm good, I'm ready to go. Um, because for every client it's going to be different. Some, you know, we need a month, others we need a week. Like it comes back like that because.
- [36:37]
So there's a point, it's a little malleable based on the person, the client, the handoff. Yeah, right. Exactly.
- [36:42]
Totally, totally.
- [36:45]
All right, Angela, as we come up on time, the last question. I know you've probably answered this before, maybe your answer's changed, but we wrap the same, we wrap every episode with the same question. What's the strangest part of agency life?
- [36:57]
Strangest part of agency life. I think I was talking to somebody about this recently is how cool people think it is on the outside and how much it is a people business. And I think one of the more challenging businesses that a business owner can choose to have. Out of all the options in the world, working with people, trying to make their businesses perform, dealing with creative and people's opinions about creative and a ton of other things mixed in. It's incredibly complex plot. All your listeners for doing what they do. It's really, really hard.
- [37:42]
Yes, incredibly difficult. Hard, challenging. But perception outward non agency folks. It's coming off as a pretty cool line of work.
- [37:51]
Super fun.
- [37:53]
Well, Angela, thanks so much for coming on the show. I know we're, we're at time. Loved hearing about just how you've evolved this sort of leave coverage model and process, how you've built the team structure and a culture to enable that. Again, I think continuity of the client experience was the umbrella term. And so anyways, a ton of actionable insights, a ton to glean. So appreciate you coming on. Always great to catch up and to chat through what's going on.
- [38:16]
You too, Kevin. Thanks for having me again.
- [38:18]
Yeah, you bet. And for everyone that's tuned in today, this has been another episode of Agency Unfiltered Sam Sa.