Human Powered: High-performing agency & consultancy teams

Running a group of agencies led by talent and fuelled by technology - with Kate Ross

How do you align individual and business goals across an agency group with 120 people?
Kate Ross is Managing Director at eight&four Group. She co-founded her agency 14 years ago, sold it to an agency group, and then acquired the group 2 years ago.
In this episode, Kate shares how she:
Invests heavily in AI to boost morale and reduce fear of the technology
Builds high-performing teams by ensuring people care about the business, about clients and about each other 
Emphasises her team understanding the context and taking ownership of everything they do
Challenges her team to come up with ideas for business success and then empowers them to execute 
Actively seeks out feelings of pain in the business to help address and resolve them
Has a robust 6-month probationary period to ensure new hires are a good fit
Kate also talks about how 3-year planning doesn’t work for them. Instead, they adopt the Kaizen philosophy of continuous process improvement.

Enabling everyone to thrive in a fully remote agency - with Tim Cameron-Kitchen

How do you identify your most motivated team members and get them to contribute even more?
Tim Cameron-Kitchen is founder at Exposure Ninja. He’s grown his fully remote agency to 80 people in the UK and Philippines over the past 12 years. 
In this episode, Tim shares how he:
Identifies people ready for more responsibility and pushes them to do more than they think they’re ready for
Leans fully towards abdication on the abdication-to-micromanagement spectrum
Uses a lot of process so everyone operates autonomously against their frameworks
Follows a 10:80:10 model for team motivation (10% are fundamentally motivated, 80% are situationally motivated, 10% are fundamentally demotivated)
Became a convert to people skills training and now invests heavily in this (especially with the leadership team)
Realised he wasn’t the best person to take the business forward so handed over the CEO reins last year
Tim also talks about Wednesday Wins and Thankful Thursdays… and how he uses a kitten Giphy to keep everyone aligned around their shared vision!

Striving to be the best search agency in the world - with Chris Ailey

How do you get quality running through every aspect of the business?
Chris Ailey is CEO & Founder at Honchō, working with the likes of Sephora, John Lewis and eBay. He started the multi-award-winning agency back in 2008.
In this episode, Chris shares how he:
Aligns everyone around their BHAG (big hairy audacious goal) to be the best search agency in the world
Hires people with the skills and characteristics they don’t already have
Grants his team the freedom to try new things and to fail, whilst ensuring accountability 
Fosters a culture of collaboration across different teams 
Pushes himself out of his comfort zone to encourage everyone else to do the same
Enters lots of awards as a way of driving the team to maintain quality
Chris talks candidly about the ups and downs of life as an agency leader.

Introverted CEO using a coaching culture to drive business success - with Zsuzsanna Recsey

How do you create a business where both extroverts and introverts can thrive?
Zsuzsanna Recsey is CEO at the community engagement agency, Standing on Giants. Previously an executive coach, she became CEO 4 years ago and has grown the business from 25 to 60 people.
In this episode, Zsuzsanna shares how she:
Has embedded a culture of resilience, emotional intelligence and coaching through individual and team programmes
Builds trust by always assuming that her team, clients and stakeholders have the best of intentions 
Makes sure the leadership team consistently demonstrates their values in all day-to-day activities
Has a process to quickly identify and address behaviour that doesn't align with their values
Has created an inclusive environment so introverts can contribute as much as extroverts
Creates space for reflection so they can all always learn from what they’ve done
Zsuzsanna’s thoughtful and reflective approach continues to create a high-performing team and a high-performing business. She’s not the typical Jazz Hands agency CEO.

Placing the idea that anything is possible at the heart of the business - with Sam Fenton-Elstone

How do you set the ethos of your entire business just from its name?
Sam Fenton-Elstone is CEO & Co-Founder at Anything is Possible. He’s grown his agency to 65 people in just 6 years, winning almost 40 awards along the way.
In this episode, Sam shares how he:
Embeds the idea that ‘life is better when anything is possible’ across every aspect of the business 
Gets the right balance between having structure and boundaries, and granting autonomy
Sets the business up so autonomous team members can make good decisions as quickly as possible - and so the business benefits from collective intelligence
Constantly strives to build a better, more exciting, more inclusive agency compared to the norm
Runs the business like a university with a disproportionate spend on L&D and a strong Alumni network
Encourages everyone to push themselves forward in a way that’s right for them - enabling the team to collectively operate at their highest possible output 
Sam isn’t interested in Anything is Possible becoming a big agency. Instead, he wants them to be a great agency with everyone doing their best ever work whilst there.

Focusing on culture & the journey to build a global agency - with Ian Millner

How do you maintain an entrepreneurial spirit in a global marketing agency?
Ian Millner is Co-Founder & Global Chair at Iris, a business he started 25 years ago and which he’s helped grow to 1000 people across 17 countries.
In this episode, Ian shares how he:
Achieved the right balance between enjoying the journey and heading towards a shared destination
Brought together the right team with the right chemistry at the very start - which naturally attracted clients
Created a shared ownership structure to drive motivation and loyalty within the team (peaking at 50 shareholders)
Allowed people to follow their passions and dreams by backing their ideas for new ventures and opening in new locations
Created a sense of excitement and being together on a big caper within the business
Navigated taking outside investment and the impact this had on culture
Ian humbly talks about his incredible journey, how it unfolded, and what he did to get his team to be high-performing.

Embedding values into every aspect of the business - with Jane Slimming

How do you create and maintain a culture to enable happy and high-performing teams?
Jane Slimming is Founder and CEO of Zeal. She’s been running the agency for 14 years. 
In this episode, Jane shares how she:
Defined their values on day #1 and consistently embeds these into everything they do
Allows people to progress their careers based on their unique factors of success
Is very transparent about business performance, no matter how badly they’re doing
Gets people to disagree with her and then actively praises them when correct to do so
Launched the Zeal Bucket List to push people out of their comfort (and make their personal dreams come true)
Spearheaded Zeal to win the award for Best Agency Culture 
Jane was a great podcast guest with a lot of ‘zeal’. Her quote about what’s worse than having a hole in the team is truly memorable!

Growing a 100-person high-performing team from nothing - with Danny Bluestone

How do you maintain a high-performing team when growing from zero to 100 people
Danny Bluestone is Founder and CEO of Cyber-Duck. He started the agency in 2005 and grew it to 100 people. Last year they were acquired by CACI. 
In this episode, Danny shares how he:
- Balanced the competing needs of financial performance and the all-important people aspects
- Built a culture around adaptability, accountability, selflessness and having an entrepreneurial spirit
- Embedded the right type of behaviours both when the business was small and then when it became larger
- Implemented a recruitment process as rigorous as Google’s, based on their three pillars of exceptional talent
- Created a mission for each individual in the team aligned to their business plan 
- Recruited the wrong people in the early days and had to deal with a large-scale team rebellion 
Danny talks candidly about what worked well and what didn’t, during his almost 20-year agency journey. 

Getting everyone to learn, stretch & grow - with Vanella Jackson

How do you get everyone in a large business to be high-performing? 
Vanella Jackson was Global CEO of Hall & Partners for 13 years, leading a business with a total revenue of $130m.
 
In this episode, Vanella shares how she:
- Applied a ‘learn, stretch and grow’ ethos to underpin high performance across the business
- Made sure people felt valued and supported across 100s of team members
- Maintained an entrepreneurial spirit within a large, networked agency 
- Identified her allies, the people who would always tell her the truth about what’s going on
- Got everyone pointing in the same direction with a purpose and vision mapped back to their roles
- Liberated herself from self-criticism and then worked to liberate others
 
Vanella signs off our conversation with a challenge for all business leaders - listen to find out what this is!

Welcome to the Human Powered podcast

Welcome to Human Powered, the new podcast about creating a high-performing agency or consultancy business.
In the first episode, our host, Trenton Moss, explains why he's launching the podcast in conjunction with his bestselling book, also called Human Powered.