[dillondoyle]

My career is young. I'm only (just about) 32 but own a small agency with a partner.

This election cycle was tough.

We tried to grow in 2019 with more staff than we'd ever had.

We've always had a leadership problem of trying to transfer skills from the top down to help lift up employees that don't already 'have it' - especially (braggart time) me and my partners skills as I think our uniqueness as a firm is tied to my work in particular (which my parter is very good at picking up) especially tech & a certain unique vertical of advertising.

It's hard to find employees with multi-skillsets and experience to run things themselves using our tools. especially in politics not a lot of people come in from the outside, and there is low tech skill from the inside.

With larger staff we tried to do more training, tried to build stronger team mindset.

That I think that's our biggest weakness and leadership challenge. Still is.

An example from this cycle of it not going well:

A big problem is mistakes. Our work is hard, long hours, stressful clients making last minute decisions.

One staff member in particular made a large amount of mistakes - and big ones. More importantly didn't seem to learn from them. Lost us important clients and reputation.

So come end of cycle we usually have to downsize payroll.

Choosing who is tough. This year had to decide do we prioritize team cohesion and moral at the cost of mistakes (and our reputation is a big potential issue)? Or do we try to go with more skilled employees who are also more likely to leave, especially without the larger team bonding. Or i guess third option do we take a larger risk than usual in having larger cash loss during down period.

We went with higher skill. Well I think it just bit us, losing a key employee to another agency - the same agency the mistake employee landed at. It's not a coincidence. though to be fair in our business we usually lose people after 2/3 years anyways so maybe just stings more than a disaster of decisions.

Hiring is also a leadership challenge for everyone it seems. It's almost random given the few we hire which all look promising which ones end up excelling.

We need to improve learning skills to be more bottom up if we want to grow. But another leadership challenge: I'm also not sure it's our best path forward. we might be more profitable and successful staying smaller and being top heavy.

[raverbashing]

> losing a key employee to another agency - the same agency the mistake employee landed at

I've worked with those "mistake employees" and if they landed somewhere else that's probably the last place I would want to go.

Though to be fair everybody can make mistakes, and you would have to access if it was lack of skill, lack of attention, "impedance mismatch", or maybe it was the general climate that was making this employee less effective.

[dillondoyle]

Yes I've made a ton of mistakes. The worst are obvious typos, worse yet in a subject. The key thing is to learn and get better!

And I agree the climate or culture of our company is something we're working on and some people just don't work well in that environment. It's like a coin flip though on hires, the ones that you think are awesome sometimes don't do well and sometimes the ones that you think are green end up being amazing!

Plus it's just politics in general. It's really fast paced, high volume, crazy campaigns. the last months are like log higher work/money raised.

[redelbee]

It’s interesting that you chose 2019 to grow, wasn’t that an off year for elections and political spend?

Either way congrats on starting your own agency! I was an early employee at an agency (not focused on politics but likely similar to yours in other ways) and when I started out there were fewer than 5 employees including two founders. It was very top-led in the beginning, but as we grew to 20 people or so that became unsustainable.

At that point it became about building a system instead of trying to get everyone up to the same skill level. At a basic level we decided that we were really working with clients to set expectations and then meeting (and hopefully sometimes exceeding) those expectations. We too had issues with last minute changes, until we changed our contract and statement of work language to specify the framework for making decisions (usually budget/spend/creative related etc) and how those decisions/changes would be implemented. Same thing with mistakes: part of the expectation from both sides was built in time for QA to catch mistakes before they happened. The more you can set up the framework for success early on in the sales/pitch/onboarding the better. And clients will probably like you more for setting up reasonable guardrails in the beginning.

The framework also allowed for some influence/involvement from the top, which was helpful in filling those inevitable skill gaps. We used some version of the framework until we got to about 45 employees, and then it had to change significantly again to fix some of the bottlenecks that were coming from the top down. It also opened up more time for people at the top to work on business development and sales.

I left out a lot of details but overall it took a “systems thinking” mindset to fix issues once we got to a level where the top-down approach was no longer feasible. The system was set up from top down, but once implemented it could basically run itself with a few tweaks throughout the years. Maybe you can focus on setting up those systems instead of trying to level up every employee to be a mirror of you and your partner.

Hiring/firing when there is a strong system in place also seemed easier: look for people who can grasp/appreciate the system and their place in it, give them agency and opportunity to grow within the system, and evaluate them based on the system and the expectations it sets. We almost never lost talent to other agencies and we rarely had to fire anyone. Maybe we were just lucky, or maybe the system did its job!

My two cents on growth/profitability for an agency: The existence of other agencies, however inferior they may be, means there is a limit to how much of a premium your agency can charge. At some point someone with control over the budget is going to balk at your price and go with the competitor who is also saying they can do everything you can do. Which means at some point you will need to grow your client (and employee) roster or be satisfied with stagnating profits.

[dillondoyle]

Thanks for the long and very helpful reply. I wrote back but it also got really long... -- Yeah we have 2 year cycles so 21 is 'off' 22 is on with some good work actually municipal or ballot measures in 'off.' we typically ramp up 3rd quarter of the odd year. We hired a new senior manager/client connector role early 19 and brought on the handful of new FTEs last half of 19. This year feels slow, not having census & new districts I think is hard.

YES. That's the exact same struggle we have! making that transition from partner lead, partners doing the work, to having a more distributed 'assembly line' delegation of work to more employees.

that's good advice on client expectations. It's a struggle politics is crazy - very hard to explain just how crazy until you've worked there which is a problem unto itself. democrats really lack technical skill (at the level HN knows) because even most startups don't seem as chaotic and they pay way better. candidates themselves at the Congressional level can be the worst in causing this crazyness.

another good frame that you mentioned is thinking more in an engineering mindset of systems design might help me thank you! micro-services haha.

UGH yes pricing is the worst. That lower margin, higher volume growth is what we're trying, but I'm not sure it might be better to stay small with higher profit margin. We made slightly less profit this cycle despite having over 2x the retainers. I'm money driven so always want more so it's a big decision for us. We're going to try again this cycle - it's not like I'm struggling here, I still am doing well!

Sounds like your experience is similar on pricing. there are so many people who want to do good, come in and start a digital agency and charge no joke $2k or $3k a month for a LOT of work. And candidates and campaigns are super super cheap but in a really dumb way. Especially Democrats. Republicans will pay a flat % of what you raise, in that case the free market really does work - though sometimes too much bad incentive lots of gross (fraudulent) tactics; read the recent Trump/RNC pieces on their fundraising pages.

An example differentiator that is hard to sell or explain is we use an ESP that I don't think any other political shop use because the political features / tooling doesn't exist. I built that on top to make it fit political needs - and some other cool things like real time data for wayyy quicker reporting. I see the value, clients usually don't but most still trust us.

That switch alone usually gives a 4+% open rate bump which usually equals more than the difference in cost.

We tend to fit best & win more work with clients where there is an existing human relationship of good work or from the parent committees where our work and reputation is good, rather than just cold pitching on price to someone we don't know - much harder to win an account cold.

One good sign that we're doing some things right I actually just saw a report comparing digital firms congressional ad revenue and was surprised to see much bigger companies didn't actually have much higher Congressional ad revenue than us. But those big guys have bigger non-profit clients.

So that's a key goal for us to get more advertising. which in itself is hard; TV firms fight to keep their 'primary general consultant' monopoly even if they have no digital experience. It's gross we sometimes have to do commission splits have to give a % to tv firms just to do the digital buying (they don't do anything we do the work.. they say it's because they made the TV spot, but after charging the campaign $40k in production you'd think the campaign owns it...) sucks. but tv guys are the top historically that's who steers the ship right or wrong.

Plus Democrats barely spends on digital. It's ridiculous like PG, Coke whoever gets it and follows eyeballs and $ quickly. Dems are SO far behind despite seeing campaigns that spend more on digital ads tend to win more!

And again thanks for your input and just sharing your story, it helps I think just to connect and know we're not alone.

[geoduck14]

This was really good to read. Thank you for sharing.