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Is Your Agency Unsellable? · GOOD CEOs

• Ollie: Hello, and welcome back to Good CEOs season two, episode eight. And for those that have been hiding under a rock, as I always say, this season was all about creativity meeting capital. So I went out and I wanted to meet with as many founders of agencies, be it influencer design, creative. In whichever part of the creative economy that you're in. And I wanted to speak to different founders that have scaled their businesses and I guess kept what made them special. So we've done that, we've got a couple more to be putting out. I'm always very wary with who I say is coming up next because we have something we're about to record and something we've already recorded, so it'll have to all be a surprise. and then we have these episodes in the middle of each of the guest episodes, which is where I speak about what I'm seeing, what I'm going through, what we're going through as a business. unknown. Has a thousand conversations every month with leaders all the way from here to New York to LA to South Africa to Australia. And I feel like it's a it's a very privileged position to sit in. And before, you know, listening tools and things like that, it was really hard to get a true gauge of what is going on with all these conversations. But now, now we can we can query these conversations. And so what I do every other episode is. Find out what the key things are that we're finding in the industry and share them with you in the hope that that helps you grow, that helps you on whatever part of the journey that you're on. And then also review the conversations that I've had on this podcast, but also in the room with the CEOs. So every six weeks we meet with the good CEOs. There'll be anywhere from 10 people in that room to 30 people in that room. You never know because they're CEOs. And either they turn up last minute or they're, you know, they're busy. and I'll take the learnings from those conversations and I bring them to this room. so hopefully you find this exciting, interesting, and it nudges you along a little bit further in your world. Okay, I'm just gonna like I'm gonna tell this story as honestly as I possibly can do because I feel like when it's over-engineered, it's hard to relate to. So I'm just gonna go through what you've gone been going through. first H, so the H1 of this year, unbelievable. Best ever, best ever revenue, best ever headcount, best ever client stories. Like we've never had so many incredible things happen to us in one in one H. And I think with that energy we went into Q3 being like, whoa, it's all working. Everything's magic and we're being discovered and new briefs are coming in. And I'm not gonna lie, July and August, worse yet, they were they were low months. Like in in nearly in every single possible way. Like we we average like, I don't know, I wanna say maybe five to ten briefs a week will come in through our knock knock or through our sales conversations and we were we were like half of that. and I we sat down like, okay, is this because the world, particularly in Europe, but you know, even our American clients, has everyone just gone away? has you know, has something politically happened that contracts are being, you know, constrained, or you know, is this just the general economic climate? And then bizarrely, At the end of August, everything got really, really busy again. So, like, I spoke to so many other CEOs, and it sounded like everyone went through this exact same experience. We had a couple of our clients that re remained quite busy throughout the year, but nearly every CEO that I spoke to said their August was quieter than normal. So if you're a CEO and you're a founder being like, was that just us? I'm hoping you can hear this and think, okay, it wasn't just us. but We didn't just want to sit there. We wanted to make sure that we did whatever we could possibly do to make sure that we were generating enough business for that for that quarter. We've committed at our known we've committed to growing at 35% year on year. And that sounds really easy at the beginning of the year. You're kind of like, yeah, 35%, that's easy. You know, we'll we'll just you've got to track at this, at this level. And then you have a wobbly quarter, and you're like, ooh, okay, this is gonna be a heavy, hard-working Q4. What can we do? So what is in our power to to try and change this? We've definitely become much more much less unknown, if that's if that's the right way to put it. I'd always, when it came to marketing the business, I didn't like very salesy marketing. I didn't like selling the process as to how we did what we did. I always wanted to root the, you know, everything that we did in in the value in the outcomes of the work that we produce. So rather than speaking about doing recruitment or doing MA, I'd like to speak more about the results that doing brilliant recruitment helps you achieve. And so, you know, we've tried that, we've done that for six and a half years, built a good enough brand doing that. But then my marketing manager and I were like, okay, we actually probably should start telling the world more about what we do. And we think maybe because of that, we think maybe because we're appearing more in PR, but as we started to do more. I guess lead generative marketing, suddenly it felt like I don't know, because it's such a bad time to review this. Is it because the end of August happened and people weren't running around looking after their children and trying to battle through the holidays? Is it because of that or is it because we got better at marketing our business? I don't know. And the interesting thing is some of the things that came in were They were very like they were much bigger. The projects that we were, you know, normally we will end up getting a few exec searches come in, we'll have some like team builds that will happen. Some of these were like US-based businesses launching European headquarters, or like a satellite. we're seeing this, we're seeing quite a lot of US based companies expanding over to to Europe. Is it because they're winning European clients? Or is it because it's cheaper now to have an office in Europe? Or is it because, and in some cases, a lot of these tech companies, they need always-on, you know, design, creative campaign work. So I think it helps to have obviously the UK waking up ahead of the US, you can then do the work and then hand it over to LA. So yeah, that's one of the things we're seeing. We're seeing a lot of European businesses launching off the back of US businesses. that was the question that we ended. And I I now know Q4 is always busy. I think it generally is for a lot of people. Q4 is when people are trying to spend most of their budgets. It's when we're starting to see that you know, people have come back from the holidays and they want to get their work done. I'll c I'll report back on on where we got to, but I just wanted to be real because like if I'm gonna tell you guys how we've had a really successful H1, I'm also gonna tell you when we've had a less so successful Q3. And it has been hard. We've we've tried lots of different things. I think the biggest change that is gonna happen now with our business is that everyone's rules are now super specific and Everyone should be very, very clear on what their expected contribution is to the wider goals of the business. Everyone is clearly incentivized. If you remember my episode before this one when I was on my own speaking about ciao, ciao. it's all about the incentives and setting clarity and setting the objective. So I'm hoping that everyone is really clear on on what we are trying to achieve. It for the first time for me, it feels like I can there is no opaqueness. If I'm really honest, in the first five years of running this company, before I had a managing director and before we had all the systems in place, I felt like it was a lot of guesswork and it was a lot of, we'll try this, and that's not really worked out. And I had this CFO that said to me, stop starting and start finishing. Brilliant, I'm brilliant at starting new projects, I'm brilliant at new ideas. And but people, when they're progressing in their careers and they're getting their 10,000 hours and they're having to try and fail and try and fail. They don't need a leader or a manager to tell them to try a new thing every time the other thing they were trying didn't work out. So I think that's been a big change. It's like it's letting people make mistakes and get better and better as they as they grow in their roles versus having a me who will be like, that's not working. Try this new thing. So that that feels like a big step change for us as a business. and we're doubling down on the US. That's a massively important part of our growth. I'm flying out there this Sunday and then flying back there again in November. So huge quarter is expected. We are now in relay mode, so every single month we should have somebody in the US. And our plan is to launch officially and properly with permanent people in H1 next year. and we are putting that stake in the ground and saying this has to happen. So I'm excited. I'm very excited. and I hope he I'm hoping that we can make up the deficit of a soft. Two three. So, in the spirit of trying new things, marketing our business differently, I have taken to TikTok. And when I say I, my marketing manager is getting me to film things and then she is doing the TikTok, sometimes she's punking me. Sometimes she will say to me, can you explain what we do to a five-year-old? And then she will overlay my voice as a five year old, and I won't know that. So I'll be explaining the TikTok, or explaining what our business does to a five-year-old, but then she would have tricked me, and I will be the five-year-old. So that's fun. That's you know, culture-building content that's going on. She's doing these kind of things, these you know, Gen Zeddy marketing things. And then we're doing reactive things. So reactive pieces to content that we're seeing online. And I'm gonna talk through one of the things that I reacted to because it irked me. And it didn't just irk me because of the headline, it irked me because I didn't think it was true anymore. So I'm gonna tell you what that thing was. There was an article. There was an article in campaign, and it was titled, Can we talk about whether traditional agencies are unsellable now? Unsellable and unsellable traditional agencies is being put in the quote marks, which I think is interesting for a couple of reasons. Number one, I don't think we have ever had a brief from an agency where they say we are a traditional agency. And I think if you are saying that, it's almost become a USB because not any no agency out there in the world would refer to themselves as a traditional agency. So that was the first thing. I was a bit like, ha, this article's quite strange because I don't know anyone that this article i is supposedly written for. I can only imagine that they are referring to an advertising agency. And that is kind of where my Problem nice, because I think if you are defining yourself as a traditional agency these days, yes, you probably are unsellable, but I don't know who those agencies are anymore because the idea is as an agency grows, you grow out your capabilities and you grow out how you service those clients. So I wrote a s a little checklist of things that make an agency unsellable. and I'm hoping that you find this helpful. No client above 10%. So you shouldn't have a client that is paying for more than 10% of your income. If you do, that's very risky. All of these things are going to be so logical. If you imagine that you are buying a thing from somebody else, you will try and de-risk your acquisition as much as possible. And if you have an agency that has 50% of their income is coming from Adidas, it's scary because if Adidas that, you know, I don't know, they get cancelled or they have a supply chain problem, or anything can happen to that brand, your eggs are in that basket. So that is a very scary place to be. And if you're an acquirer, you'd look at that and you'd go, that is risky. So either that will reduce the valuation that you are given, or it will just mean that the other buyer is completely turned off. Okay, that's the one thing. Dilution of clients, be mindful. As soon as the expenditure creeps up beyond 10%, start thinking about how do we diversify our clients. The next one, and this one can irk some people as well, which is no founder dependency. Something happens, and I understand this because the the pushback that people give to this is like, well, you know, an agency, if it's really good, should be built around a really, you know, passionate collection of founders or one founder. Yes, that is very true. But then once you have sold that business. The founder is selling because they want to take their money away eventually and and leave the business. so what are you going to do? And if the business hasn't got any systems codified from that founder that have been passed down to the next rung of management, also Jay Walter Thompson is no longer writing ads. Bad example because they've now they've now been dissolved into Wonderman Thompson, who are now VML. but Charles Sarchi is no longer writing ads. And that's because Charles Sarchi managed to scale his business and then pass on the secret source, whatever that was, down. we like to believe, and I think there's an element of of identity wrapped up in our work. And I think we like to believe that we are the only person and they come to me because I'm so good at what I do. And that's fine. If you want to keep on running a lifestyle business, and there is nothing wrong with a lifestyle business. I before we started to grow unknown, it unknown was a lifestyle business. It was really profitable. It was fun and and and we were passionate people running a business. But I knew that if I ever wanted to reach an event, I had to pass on my responsibilities and make myself redundant, as it were, every year. So the business wasn't relying on me. so that's a big thing. No, no founder dependency. The next is scale systems and operations. this sounds really obvious, but my god, we've seen so many client situations where they've gone in to do a deal and They are running off spreadsheets, there is no system in place, everything is manual. There isn't really a reason now for any workflows in a business to be manual. We have so many AI automation tools in our businesses. This should be quite an easy one to to get nailed down. and if you don't have that person within your team, definitely bring in a type A human being that is operationally minded and thrives and gets you know a lot of enjoyment out of building the systems that you know essentially make you move faster. Margins, pretty obvious, but if we're anything under 20% margins, it's gonna be very hard to to scale and sell your business. You need to show that you can do the work and make money from doing the work and not lose money every single time you make an account make a campaign or whatever the work your agency produces. Growing client spend, we want to see this is the thing. Now I think the days of the AOR retain and deals whatever are going away. That doesn't mean that your agency can't get repeat business and growing accounts expenditure from your clients. I think there's less of a demand of five-year contracts from clients and there's more of an acceptance to see the revenue lines and see, okay, right, I can see that Burberry have been spending 200,000, 400,000, 800,000, one okay, I can see that's tracking up up and to the right. And You must be doing something right if their expenditure is increasing. If I see that that's going down, obviously I'm gonna say w where else are they going with their money? Like what's happening there? So that's obvious, but like I think I'm saying this because it's like don't don't worry if you are not locking your clients in for recurring revenue. I put this ahead of recurring revenue because if you can see that your client expenditure is trending up and to the right, does it matter if you have a contract in place? Do the contracts even mean anything? Putting that out there for you. This one's a contentious one. Look, average CAGR compounds annual growth. Learning all these words. average growth, I think, of a business in the UK is like 6%. So if you're growing more than 6% a year, you'll you're above average. Nice. That doesn't necessarily mean that you are acquirable. And don't forget, that is across all company sizes. So, like, you know, companies that are billion dollars worth of revenue to be still growing at 6% is really good. Companies that are doing a million and you know, whatever, a hundred thousand, you'd you'd hope that that company was growing by ten, twenty, thirty percent. The litmus test we've generally seen, particularly for agencies that are having like three years of good growth, you do want to see beyond twenty, twenty-five percent compounded annual growth. And I think most companies are they're expecting to see like the revenue really trending upwards. The profitability you can have I want to say like worry less. I'm gonna be careful with how I say this because I don't want to see a you know, a blot in the copybook to see that you've you've lost money in a year. But if you can reason with us and say, like, okay, that was a huge year that we spent money on expanding into the US, or that was a year that we doubled down on our tech, or we made lots of senior hires, and as you can see, we've had two years since then and we're now back to a profitable place, then that's that's that's fine. But the thing I've written above all of the these are tactical things. These are back-end tactical things. And depending on your business, you haven't have you haven't got to have all of these things ticked off. If you do, then that's brilliant. The valuation of your business can can grow for sure. But the most important thing that is intangible, and the reason why I wrote this whole post originally is having a distinctive taste in creative design, whatever it is, the People recognize you for and they say, they are the guys that that do X. They are like this, but they. There's a brilliant strategist called Alex Smith who says, You should be able to describe your agency or your business in we're like a mm, but we mmm. he always speaks about we're either normaling the weird or we're weirding the normal. Weirding the normal is Basically, the job of every agency. How do we make this new agency sound different to what has come from before? We're like a browning agency, but we're purely focused around digital experience. I don't know. whatever it is, it needs to be very clear. They always speak about the pub test. Because could someone say to their friend in a pub very cleanly what your business does that is different, distinctive, and and relevant. that's the most important thing. That other people understand what you do. And I think it's It's challenging because the more clients want to spend with you and get you to do things that perhaps you weren't doing originally, you can see a lot of agencies dilute their propositions by saying yes to an ever-growing client expenditure. That's fine, that's good. But there is a point, and if we go back to Natalie Graeme, if we even go back to Ryan Honey, where you be you much prefer to be known as the agency that never miss 100% of the shots they take, they score and they make these campaigns that are incredible. Than the one that's kind of saying, yes, because the money's there, and we sort of did this thing we've never done before and we didn't do it very well. If you are gonna diversify your capabilities and you are moving slightly away from what made you distinctive, make sure you apply the same with the same obsession in that capability. hire well. Which is a very self serving sentence, I'm I will admit. so that was my first thing. That was my my little attempt at reacting to something on on the old TikTok. Okay, that was my that was my first one. And then I I I was on a bit of a roll this week. This was this again felt like it was from the 2005 archives, this question. And this question was should people accept lower salaries to work at bigger agencies? No. And I d and this this kind of made me go, wait, I've got to check that I'm still connected to what talent is talking about in two thousand and twenty six. So I I did a quick scan of our brain at Unknown. And this is the thing that's, you know, measuring conversations, putting out insights. It anonymizes everyone's data, but it will tell you generally what the insights are in in the creative economy. And I asked, you know, how often does it come up that people are willing to accept lower salaries to work for a bigger agency? And I can tell you from 6,000 conversations, anonymised conversations, zero. That is the amount of people that said that they would be willing to take a lower salary to work at a bigger agency. Which made me think, why are they even asking this question? Because that doesn't come into any i i there's not a pull factor. And I think that's really interesting. And perhaps why that was the point of the article. I think it was, because the the subheading was underneath. People used to take lower salaries for a big name and exposure to bigger clients, but that is no longer the case. Absolutely. It used to be safer to go and work for Ogilvy WPP because they had built a scaled system where if if you were there, you could be put onto a client. Now, because of the reduce, there's a reduction in the budgets, there's these weighty companies that have office space and office managers and back-end staff and loads of really you know heavy cost line items, it's no longer safer. If anything, given the fact that brands are now much more au fay with working with independent agencies and they're kind of cool with working with smaller teams. They're not as bothered, you know, having a massive procurement team. I think because of that, you could argue that in some independent agency cases it is safer to work for an independent company. so I think the idea of being exposed to bigger clients and therefore you should be taking less of a salary, I think that is definitely a relevant question for the naughies, I would say. I think that was when that was deemed as the thing to do. Indies were risky. I would say that's gone. That era has gone. The things that matter, and and because there is so much uncertainty in this world, we we focus more around the things that are certain, or at least the things that you can make certain for the talent that are joining your business. The three things that came up were work, progression, and autonomy. Work is the work going to be good? What is the work that I'm coming in to do? What are the clients like? What are the relationships like around that client? What are the relationships like around that team that are producing that work? all of that stuff is super important. I want to know that I can make good work, basically. The next is progression. And I I think holding all the bigger agencies stopped doing this as much or as well as they they perhaps could. I think the benefit of having a structure of a bigger agency is that you can say, when you're at this level and you do this, you move up to this level. This is one of the most important things that I think we don't speak about enough. And it is: if I join your business, what is the story that I'm going to be able to tell about my career in three years' time? That should be the first thing that really is covered in first, second, or third interview. Like, I understand this is a mutual exchange. I give you my brain and body for three years and my mind. I give you my time, and in return. I get to tell my story of my career to the future hire or to somebody within this business. What is that story going to be? Why should I give my time? And what is the exchange here? So progression is really important. And then the last one, and I wang on about this one, but that is autonomy. People want to be trusted to get their job done. They don't want what we call fake autonomy. Where you're brought in to do a job and your manager or your director is all over you and they're changing everything you're doing, they're hustling you, they're like, Have you got this? Have you sent this thing over? Like there are so many memes about these types of managers that like that that just get in the way of making good progress. They they are what is wrong with a lot of these places where rather than contributing to the value of the project and contributing to moving things along in a good way, they meddle. And get in the way. And I think a lot of these people are so fearful of making mistakes. And I get it, you know, if we're empathetic to those people, they are probably fearful of losing their own role and job. And so therefore they try and control. these are the types of things that stop people from joining other companies. You want clean work lines where people are kind of allowed to make errors because that is the only way they learn. won't do that again. Yeah, I'll try, you know. But if you have these people that are. Super controlling, you know, asking for crazy updates every hour of every day. that's gonna put people off. That's gonna make people leave your business. Probably good people that want to be trusted to get their job done. And this isn't just at like middle management level. I'm talking about like CEOs, particularly in holding companies, where they are called a CEO, but they are given the responsibilities and autonomy of someone that is not one. You can't make decisions on your own hiring, you've got to stick to the script, you've got to da da da. So that big A, and this is why we're seeing a lot of people going to the PE backed companies or they're going back to independent agencies, autonomy. The independent agencies haven't got enough people or time to be giving you fake autonomy. And yeah, though those are the things that matter, I'm gonna say. Can you offer some level of certainty with work, progression, and autonomy? And no, nobody is asking or accepting a lower salary to work at a bigger agency. Okay, so this is the part of the show where I reveal some of the conversations that we've been having in the group of CEOs. For those that don't know, I have a WhatsApp group. It's called Good CEOs. There are 71 founders in there and CEOs, and they range from billion dollar n American network agency CEO to one million pound independent agency CEOs. So it's really broad and and very diverse in terms of the agencies that they run, everything from influencer to branding. So it's really interesting. And we meet every six weeks. I had two questions this week actually, in the last week, where I've asked them outright what would you do in this situation? And without revealing too much of what the situation was, I can tell you about one situation, but I can't tell you about the other. I'm gonna tell you what their responses were because this is a very interesting question and it comes down to client suitability. Agencies obviously cover so much territory. And I think it's a sign of running a good agency when you suddenly get the client that knocks on the door that makes you go, Are we gonna take that on or not? It could be fossil fuels, it could be political, it could be anything, you know, booze, gambling. Like a lot of these types of clients are contentious because people that work within businesses obviously have their own values and It's a very hard, fine line to decide what you say yes and what you say no to. So I brought one to the table and I said, What would you do in this situation? And I guess reassuringly, no one had the same response. At one end, you had somebody saying, We have a list of types of companies that we say yes and no to. And if anyone crosses that list, it's a flat no. We don't even entertain it, we pass them on and we say go speak to this place instead of us. But the other is they have no list, and their way of saying yes or no to clients is really simple. They do an al a survey and they'll say, Who would like to work on this brand? And it's anonymous. And if they have a majority vote to say that they would, they accept it. And if they have a majority that say they won't, they decline it. In another situation, One of the agencies said, if we have anyone that wants to work on this brand that works for our business, then we'll say yes to it, which is interesting. and I found that a really interesting conversation because certainly post-2020, I'm gonna say, when we had everything from I think COVID brought a lot of humanitarian issues to the forefront, whether it was BLM, whether it was Mental health, there were so many purposes that were kind of brought to the the mainframe of our conversation. Work from home policy, like everything became very what's the word? It it felt like for a moment everyone had to have a viewpoint on every political thing that was happening in the news. You had to have a reaction from your business on this new thing that's happening in the news. I feel like we're seeing that a lot less now, So I th I thought that was really interesting to know that. It isn't clean cut and you have to have your own policies. I think the key thing is to get ahead of the game and have a policy on this stuff versus making the decision out of your gut. Like my gut is telling me that we should say yes to this client. I think knowing what you do and don't stand for is really, really important. And telling everybody in the company that that is the policy is a wise thing to do before it's too late. Because what you don't want to do is have that client like, are you gonna work with me or not? And it's like, wait, we've got to go write up a policy now because you made this really confusing for us. So yeah, I'd highly recommend writing a policy for clients that you say yes and say no to, and then be super clear on that, because then it's not a question. You can just go, boom, here's as according to our policy, da-da-la. So that was the first thing. The next, and this is definitely very relevant for anyone that is expanding a company into the US. So as I said, in H1 next year, we want to have our high our hires lined up. We want to have the people that we want to hard launch unknown US there. We already have people that go back and forth and we are fifty percent revenue coming from the US. So it's time for us to be in the US full time. And I asked my good CEOs, can you give me some advice on how to make sure that your offices are connected and it doesn't feel like You have two different businesses. So, in no particular order, here are the pieces of advice I was given. Go to every office on the regular and make sure that you are working along them on some projects, and so it feels like you are connected. I like that. we have a weekly All Hands where each studio presents on rotation. Interesting. Heavy slack game, including building cross-office communities on movies. music, sports, cats, dogs, anime, and a mad list of any other things. That's interesting. So like having communities built built around people's combined loves. That's really cool. I didn't think about that. Like, yeah, that's smart. I like that. global offsite. Best money we've spent is on a global offsite. Now I know this agency, I know this agency basically goes to a location in the middle of all their offices or not. Like it could be anywhere. And for three days they will just have workshops and I think a little bit of a party at the end, but making sure that there's things to do for everyone. Some might not drink and some might prefer to play sports. Like it's a really, really cool thing to do. overcommunicating on everything. Us and them is the death of many a business. Yeah. I a few people have said here, don't have unknown New York. Just call it unknown. It's just another part of the business. It's another like office, but it's still unknown under one roof. Never having the us and them and making sure that people are working on projects together from the beginning. I think that's really, really important. strong social budget. Okay, that's fun. Lots and lots of merch. A lot of people are saying merch is quite funny. A lot of people are saying this travel budget. So give people a travel stipend. Is that how you pronounce that? Stipend, stipend, for your team, give them X amount. To travel to where you are, or vice versa. So, like getting everyone to travel and encouraging people to go and see people in real life is really important. I love this. Wow. And there's so many more other things. Make sure your Pat Leave bereavement policy is properly tailored. Yep, take great care. don't everyone say never let us and them become a thing. and again, it's cultural differences here, understanding that there are going to be political differences that are remarkably different to. What people in the UK generally treat as the norm. that's massive. I can really understand that. And even things like people are saying like Matleave Pat Leave bereavement policies are adopted for the US and having a good, strong policy for holidays as well. Because obviously we have much more here. anyway, that I could reel off this list and speak about this for a long time, but I'm I'm really I was grateful that I asked that question because Jesus Christ, so many people came with like helpful things. Umone said, get them to make sure from the day one you get them to call American football, American football and soccer football. That feels a bit resistant. That feels like you're not you're not adopting cultures here. We're just saying, no, no, no, it's this way forward. I think they're taking the piss. Anyway, I hope that helps. I hope everyone listening to this that's thinking about expanding into the US, that's just a bit of helpful information. Question time. All right, we're gonna go to question time because that is the time. And this is where people have responded to an email, one of my newsletters, and I answer a question. So, question number one. Hey Ollie, how transparent do you need to be with your team when the quarter has been shit? How do you make them believe that the next one will be better? Very good question. And actually, we've just done some feedback on this to ask. how can we improve our weekly calls? And some of the feedback we've had is like when we're having a shit quarter, it feels like you talk a lot about that. so there is a there is a balance here, and that is facts and speaking in clear facts. So we are very, very transparent to say, here's where the the target was, here's where we are, here's what the deficit is, and here's what we're expecting to be done. Here's what we're gonna do, here's what we're expecting you guys to do. That, to be honest, is the clearest way. Of communicating to our team because if they the the biggest issue you have is when people are like, I feel out of control. I feel like I can't help help or change this, and you're blaming me. So big big transparency, big clarity on what the deficit is, and then big actions as to what you're expecting someone to action and do to change that. And we give some kind of I I'm wary to blame things on macro situations. I always say control the controllables. And yes, you can blame things on holiday and everything else, but we we knew that was coming. So did we and can we all say that we did everything we could to change the outcomes? Were our inputs higher than they usually are? and if the answer is no, then we kind of know where the accountability is. And it's on all of us. It's on our managers, it's on our people that are executing their jobs to change the level of inputs if we can foresee a bad quarter coming. So I hope that answers your question. Clarity, no shame, like taking accountability. The other thing is as well is like, here's what I'm going to do differently. Here's how I'm going to show up. And here are the things that I'm going to commit to and lead from the front on that versus like you need to do this better. So having the joint accountability thing is really clear. Hope that helps. And then the next question. Hey Ollie, what happens when your agency has too many projects, clients it isn't proud of? We have loads of bankable clients, but not enough that look good in a deck. I think shop window work, you don't really need more than three or four. I would say prioritize if you have like three or four relevant recent case studies, and relevant and recent, unless they are like world-renowned, I think once they're beyond two years old, you need some new ones. That's my kind of rule, really, is like you need to have three or four calling cards that are clear definition of what you do really well for hopefully either Brands that were unrecognizable and you've made them recognizable or very well known brands. if you have too many projects that you're not proud of, if that's impacting how many new case studies that you can take in, rule of thumb is like you should have one shop window case study each quarter. and if you are getting to the end of the year where you're like, We have one for the year, it's time to start dialing up clients and start to look for clients that you can build more of a beautiful shop window that will then attract more clients in. That should become a focus then. But I'd go for one a quarter, one really strong one a quarter at least. Okay. Well, thank you very much for listening. I hope you've this was helpful in some kind of way. I hope this has landed in your ears at a time where you're trying to make a decision, trying to move forwards. This has been quite a problem solution-based episode. So I'm hoping that some of the problems that we've covered off have been interesting, or at least are in your life right now, or or you solve them. we have a very, very exciting guest coming up next. So I'm really looking forward to hearing what you think of that. Please keep the questions coming. I love answering these questions. They're very fun. And I look forward to seeing you all next time.