Eric Facas is founder and CEO of Media Cause, a digital agency focused on serving nonprofit and social good clients. Eric left a comfortable job at Google to start working on nonprofits. He tells us how he originally gave away his time for free, how he has embraced Bill Gates’ giving pledge, even though he is a self-professed thousandaire, why he tries to fire himself from jobs, why he limited his team members to no more than 30 hours of client work a week, and his strategy behind hosting daily office hours available to anyone at his company
Eric Facas is founder and CEO of Media Cause, a digital agency focused on serving nonprofit and social good clients. Eric left a comfortable job at Google to start working on nonprofits. He tells us how he originally gave away his time for free, how he has embraced Bill Gates’ giving pledge, even though he is a self-professed thousandaire, why he tries to fire himself from jobs, why he limited his team members to no more than 30 hours of client work a week, and his strategy behind hosting daily office hours available to anyone at his company
David Rodnitzky (David) (00:02): In this episode of Agentic Shift, we talked to Eric Facas, founder and CEO of Media Cause, a digital agency focused on serving nonprofit and social good clients. Eric left a comfortable job at Google to start working on nonprofits. He tells us how he originally gave away his time for free, how he has embraced Bill Gates’ giving pledge, even though he is a self-professed thousandaire, why he tries to fire himself from jobs, why he limited his team members to no more than 30 hours of client work a week, and his strategy behind hosting daily office hours available to anyone at his company. Enjoy the show.
Eric, thanks for joining us today.
Eric Facus (Eric) (00:39):Absolutely, David. Thanks for having me.
David (00:42): Yeah, excited to talk to you. Well, let’s start out, I would love to hear your founder story. You and I met many years ago when you were working at Google. So maybe talk to us about how you went from Google to starting Media Cause.
Eric (00:56): Yeah. Very accidental, to be honest with you. You and I worked together. Part of that time, you worked at an agency, and I worked with agencies at Google, and through that experience, I swore off ever working for an agency, learning the challenges of day-to-day founders and what they’re dealing with and wanted no part of that. So for me, it was very, very accidental, and it started with wanting to take a bit of a break from work after about 12 years or so in digital marketing.
Feeling a lack of fulfilment in what I was doing, I decided to take some time off and volunteer for nonprofits, and that led to where I am now, which is leading an agency that works exclusively with nonprofits. So very, very accidentally that I got there through volunteering, but really learned the feel, learned what nonprofits needed while offering up my help and other volunteers to help with them and said no the first 20 times a nonprofit tried to hire me as a consultant. This was my gap year from work to volunteer, and if I couldn’t do the work, I’d find someone else to volunteer for them and was eventually faced with the idea of having to go back to work at the end of the year and loved working with nonprofits and decided the only way that this worked was to say yes when they wanted to hire me.
So very organically I started to say yes and training up other people to do the work after I had a few clients, and I closed my eyes for a minute. Next, I had an agency.
David (02:31): Specifically, what are the services that you’re offering to nonprofits?
Eric (02:35): Well, really these days we offer everything. We’re a full service digital marketing agency that includes creative, brand, media buying, paid and organic social technology, websites, everything under the sun to help our nonprofits to succeed online. But in the early days, it was what I knew, which was search engine marketing and some social media. And it grew from there.
David (03:01): So, you went from real, compensated role at Google to not just working at an agency, but working for nonprofits, which nonprofits don’t tend to have the nine-figure budgets and sponsor stadiums. So this is obviously very mission-driven decision on your part. Talk about how you left the cushy job and really took a risk to do something for social good.
Eric (03:23): Yeah. It was a little bit hard for sure, but I had thankfully set aside some money. I didn’t get to Google quite early enough where I didn’t have to work, but I didn’t have to work for the year, and you know what it’s like any time you start something, you have to reduce your salary to next to nothing until you can raise money for it or start making money. And so I realized that that would be part of the plan, but certainly doing it for nonprofits. As I said, I started as a volunteer. I didn’t aim to start an agency for nonprofits.
So I aimed to really sort of fulfil myself from the inside out by giving back. And so it made sense that it was zero pay, and it really felt great spending my days helping nonprofits that were truly working to make the world a better place but really struggled with their marketing felt wonderful. Making an impact using your superpowers for good really felt great. And so collecting zero money for that was fine and I had the savings that I put aside. And part of the inspiration came from the giving pledge. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Bill Gates and all these other billionaires that said I want to give a half of my net worth during my lifetime.
Well, I was a thousandaire, not a billionaire, and so I set aside a good chunk of money, which was enough for me to live off of for a year. And that was half of all the money that I had, paying my bills. And so it wasn’t until the end of that first year that was like, okay, really got to figure this out because I don’t have any more money to set aside. My wife’s pregnant now with our first child. So my expenses are about to go up, and I really need to start planning for a future that involves other people.
And thankfully, at that point, I started to take on some clients and really kind of got pushed into starting this agency because I needed the money, and still worked for far less than what I made for five, six years. I think it probably took that long to get back to what my base salary was at Google, and I think, more than anything, that’s a great driver to work harder and to grow business when you know that you need to make more money to support yourself and your family.
David (05:43): I’m curious, did you have doubts along the way? Did you ever think like, man, I should have just kept riding the gravy train?
Eric (05:56): I had doubts every moment of every day, but I can tell you this. I never had doubts that I had done the wrong thing of shifting from for-profit to nonprofit work. That was very, very clear from the start of doing it, that I had made the right decision, but as a founder, I’m sure you’ve gone through this, success is not linear. You experience failures on a daily basis and you question your strategy and your approach and people on the team that you’ve hired, anything that you could have done differently to be more successful. And so yes, absolutely, those doubts were there.
But working in the nonprofit space is different. There is a lot to it that is hard to walk away from. So I never once thought to myself, I’m going to go back to Google to see if any of my friends at Facebook or Twitter are hiring. I was up to the nonprofit space from the beginning.
David (06:55): I’d love to talk about some of the specific challenges working with nonprofits, but maybe just sticking with the founding of the business for now, what were the early challenges that you encountered as you tried to grow this and turn this from a labor of love to a labor that pays the mortgage?
Eric (07:10): Yeah, scale is not easy at an agency. You can’t pay yourself a healthy salary until you grow to a significant size that warrants that. And so you want the challenges and something, thankfully, I learned really early on is like you guys sort of take care of everybody else before you take care of yourself and trust that it’s going to be okay in the long run if you can scale, if you can grow. And so that recognition was really, really helpful knowing that you got to get to 12, 15, 20 people at an agency and 20-something clients before your job has a decent size of salary to it.
I think finding clients was not as much of a challenge as I had heard others talk about. I think for me, the real big difference there is very few agency owners spend the year doing outreach to their target audiences, getting to know them, and offering them free services before they start a business. In fact I’ll say that maybe next to no agencies have ever done that to start a business. And so I built up a really wonderful network in a short period of time. And so that was really helpful and I think that really helped the business get off the ground.
Another challenge, I think, just around related to scale is how do you make the services that you do repeatable? So as you hire someone, you’re not reliant on what they know and what they bring solely to the table in order to deliver quality work. So creating process docs, creating a methodology that allows you to deliver high services is one of the big challenges that we faced in the early days for sure.
And then the last one is the culture on your small agency. When you go from 5 people to 10 people, you immediately absorb the culture of the 5 new people that you hired, and sometimes that’s good and sometimes that’s not so good, and you have to be very, very cognizant of not just can someone do the work, it’s hard enough to recruit people to a smaller agency in the early days, but what impact are they going to have on culture and on other points here? So definitely had some bumps on the road related to that in the first couple of years.
David (09:38): I definitely want to get back to culture, so let’s bookmark that. You mentioned a couple of other things. First of all, let me ask, how many people do you have at the company now?
Eric (09:46): They’re about 60 fulltime staff at the agency, another 20 or so freelancers that we work with.
David (09:54): And so you mentioned scaling this beyond yourself. So it’s always a question I have about working in the business versus working on the business. What sort of transition has that meant for you and what responsibilities are different for you today than they were in the early days of the business?
Eric (10:09): I forget where this advice came from, but it’s probably not unique. It’s probably one of those things that everyone talks about. But the role of an early CEO of any business is to, as quickly as possible, fire themselves from their jobs. And in the early days, you have 7, 8, 10, 50 jobs that you do, from HR to recruiting to marketing to sales to delivery of the work, just to name some of the broader categories. And you have, from the early days, I started to think about what could I fire myself from and what makes sense for me to do versus where can I hire someone that’s better than me at to do?
So things around delivery of work. It wasn’t that difficult to find people that were better search engine marketers than me that had done it more recently, that had read all the blogs in the past week and watched all the Google updates that came out and understood what all of that meant. And so that was one of the easy things to give up that you know as a CEO of a company, you should not be doing forever.
I think the next really, on the operations side of things, really thinking about building out those process docs and hiring and HR and accounting and, you know, all the aspects that go into running the operation itself, those really quickly got added to the list of things to fire myself from.
Every year, I have two or three things that I put on my list that I want to fire myself from, and again, I’ve been pretty good at being able to accomplish that all through the lens of where I can add the most value to our company, which is really like big picture strategy, sales and marketing, and supporting a whole lot of people in high-level roles to help them be better at running their departments.
David (12:09): So what are you firing yourself from this year? What’s on the list?
Eric (12:13): 2022 goals, I need to fire myself from the remaining financial operations of the business. We don’t have a CFO, we don’t have a Senior financial person on the team. So I still do a hell lot on a day to day that I would be better suited to hire someone to do.
David (12:34): You mentioned process a couple of times. So when someone starts at Media Cause, what percentage of their day is process and what percentage of it is art?
Eric (12:46): We have a 90-day onboarding process which is much heavier in the first 30 days than the second two months of it. And so we’ve got a pretty long checklist that someone needs to complete in that first 30 days. And the vast majority of that is learning about process, meeting people and learning about process in those 30 days. Some of that process could be tactical to their job, learning the process docs for doing the social media, audit, for example, for joining on social media team. But some of it is just how we treat our clients, what project management roles do you have as an account manager, those sorts of things. So some sort of internal processes that are less about the art of the work, but more about us as an agency and how we work.
So yeah, it’s really heavy in the first 30 days, and then it’s lighter over the next couple of months, and then really at the end of those three months, people are operating a much more client facing role. But I’d say one thing that’s a little bit unique to us as an agency is that we’ve built our entire agency around the model of a 30-billable hour workweek for our staff. And that’s at general staff level and that goes down more when you get to a management level. And then down to a zero billable workweek as you get to senior management level.
That’s very, very unique, and it allows us to focus on things outside of the role itself, out of the tactics. That could be developing process. We rely on our managers a lot, on our directors, on our department heads, to develop process. So in order for them to be able to do that and not go crazy working 60 hours a week, they might only have 15, 17 hours of client billable work on a week. So we can constantly not just develop the process but improve it and add to it and get better at it.
David (14:51): I love that concept. I have to say that it’s eerily reminiscent of the 20% time at Google.
Eric (14:59): Yes, it is. I fight the urge to talk about, well, when we’re at Google, we used to- because I find it obnoxious when other people do that about their past, but that is an area that I can proudly say was rooted in what I learned from Google. That was one of the few lessons that I shared with our team early on is that we need to be able to leverage our teams’ time above and beyond like what we were getting paid to do. And we did some really wonderful things with that time, above and beyond just having the time to process docs.
David (15:33): Is there a structure it or is it unstructured. And I go back to the Google example. I believe in the earliest days of Google, it was completely unstructured. It was like you want to go learn botany, go do it. And then I think more recently, I don’t know if it even exists anymore, and if it does exist, I think it’s highly structured. Where do you fit on that continuum?
Eric (15:52): Yeah, it’s pretty structured. So for us, it’s really like 30% time if you’re basing on a 40-hour workweek, which is our goal when you’ve got 30 of those hours. We assume that about a third of that is going to go to internal meetings and other obligations that you’re required to attend within the agency that might not be billable but you’re required to do your job. A portion of that can go to marketing. For us, we ask our team to write blog posts, to help with case studies. And so we want to make sure that they’ve got the right amount of time to do that. I’m sure at some point you want to talk to me about marketing, but one of our best marketing hacks that we developed is to have our team all contribute to the content that we produce. So we can produce high-level content on a regular basis.
And then we do have approved projects that people can be a part of outside of the marketing aspects. And those could be these sort of fliers that we take. Say, we want to build something new. We want to build a tool that does X, Y, and Z. Someone might want to be a part of that or we want to launch a campaign that helps support better diversity in our field, which is something that we’re doing. And so a whole lot of people would be able to raise their hand and be a part of that project with their additional time.
David (17:15): That’s awesome. It sounds like you built a great culture. I want to get to culture, but I’m going to punt on it for now because you did mention something about content marketing. So I’ll just go there, which is you said you’ve spent a year basically volunteering and networking before you started this agency. Today, where are your clients coming from? It sounds like you have a network. You mentioned network marketing. Where else do you get your business?
Eric (17:38): The vast majority of them come from inbound leads. We get about 20 RFPs every month, people coming to our website and asking for proposal. A whole lot of those can afford an agency. They might have a tiny budget. That’s a big problem in the nonprofit space with just the money that’s available, but a good amount of those do have filthy budgets and we turn out a dozen or so proposals every month just from inbound leads. And so content marketing is the driver of that, SEO is a central component to having that content found, and we rank on a whole bunch of keywords that matter to us and people find blog posts, case studies, white papers, and other things that we produce and come onto the site that way.
Social media is another driver of that where content is really behind it. We’re like sharing the other case studies and blog posts and other things that we’re doing on social media leads to an awareness amongst our client base that brings them back to our website to submit an RFP request.
David (18:41) What’s the relative breakdown of effectiveness of social media versus SEO. You typically see on a 50:50 split or you think more on one versus the other?
Eric (18:53) Yeah, way more traffic coming from SEO than from social media. I don’t know if it’s 80%, but it’s high. It’s something in that range. SEO is the vast majority of our inbound and the higher quality leads as well.
David (19:09): I feel like social media, from a content marketing perspective, gets a lot more attention than SEO. So the fact that you’re saying it’s totally flipped to SEO is, I don’t know what it’s indicative of, but I find it interesting.
Eric (19:21): Yeah. I think it depends on the business. For us, we’re B2B. We’re trying to reach executives at nonprofits, and when you think about how people spend their time on social media, of course, everybody is on social media, which is I’m sure, you see these stats and it’s like a billion, two billion people that use Facebook every day. So of course, your target audience is there. But the executive director to a nonprofit is on Facebook because they want to see their friends from high school and what they’re up to or their kids’ pictures from college. They don’t want to learn about a new marketing agency that they may or may not well hire.
So we had very little success driving business from Facebook and Twitter, a little bit of success on LinkedIn. It’s an environment that people are there for professional networking. So we do a lot more on LinkedIn than what we do on Facebook, but we had to prioritize at some point a couple of years ago, and Facebook made zero sense for us. We’ve gotten zero business from Facebook, and so we had to think about how we use Facebook differently and Instagram as well.
So for us, we do care about them a little bit from a recruitment and employer recruitment tool. We think about finding new employees and displaying our culture through stories on Instagram, as an example, but we’re not generating client interest and RFPs from Instagram, Facebook, zero.
David (20:48): It makes sense given the B2B nature. For your clients, you actually do quite a bit of social media, though, and I guess that’s because many of these are consumer-facing nonprofits.
Eric (20:58): Absolutely, yeah. It’s a totally different ball game for our clients. They’re looking to meet new donors that care about the environment or whatever issue or area that they work in. Instagram and Facebook and Twitter are huge parts of that.
David (21:10): So regarding clients, one question I do want to ask you is you said that you get 20 or 30 RFPs and a lot of the clients are not big enough to work with you. I imagine this must be somewhat challenging because probably some of these nonprofits are near dear to your heart, and you’d love to, if you had the time, maybe do it for free even, but you’ve got to make these calls. But how do you struggle with that?
Eric (21:31): Yeah, that was one of the really big challenges that we faced early on just thinking about the strategy for the business. How do we create a business in an industry that struggles with budgets, and we’ve worked really hard at that, I’ll tell you, and the answer to that was from an early stage to begin to tier our business. So we actually have five tiers in our offices, something that you or other agencies do. But we have five internal tiers that we label when we talk to our prospects, and it’s all based on spend. It’s all based on how much we like somebody, about how much they’re able to spend with us, they get routed to a different tier.
In those tiers, we offer completely different services. We can’t offer a lot of the things that we want to do to a Tier 1 client because they don’t have the budget to do it. So a lot of clients come to us and say, hey we really need help with fundraising, and we’ve got to $1,200 a month. And in order to do fundraising well, we would fail. If they gave us $1,200 a month and they needed us to raise a bunch of money for them, we wouldn’t be able to. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to be able to dedicate the time that someone needs for that budget.
What we’ve done is we figure out what can we actually do for $1,200 a month. So we’ve got a smaller set of services that we can offer them, and it’s not just that it’s affordable for them. We’ve tried to carve out the services that will create the biggest impact for them. So things like Google Ad Grants where Google is giving the media for free so we can drive thousands of people to their website. And maybe we can add on some landing page optimization so that they’re actually capturing a decent amount of supporters through that traffic. And let’s set up Google Analytics so that we actually know what’s happening when we send traffic to their site, and we can stagger some of those things out so that they can afford that over the first couple of months before we dive into driving all that traffic.
So we feel like we’ve created a scenario where we can do our best to help the nonprofits that are smaller in size. As you said, it’s really hard to say no to them because in a lot of cases, those are the most inspirational. They don’t have the bureaucracy and the red tape that some of the massive nonprofits have. They’re community-based. They see a problem, they just start solving it. And why not find out how to help those guys? That feels really, really good. So even with that said, because we work in the nonprofit space, there are a whole lot of people that don’t have $1,200 to spend. So we still run into situations that we have to say no to them.
On the flip side, now that we’ve grown, we have clients that are $50,000 a month retainers and are using all of the services that we offer and are raising tens of millions of dollars a year and need the expertise that they would expect from any agency. We’ve gone head to head with some of the biggest agencies in the space and won because of our nonprofit expertise. So we need to be able to deliver services to those organizations that are 100+ million dollar a year in billing and 80 people in their marketing department.
And so we can’t offer them $1,200 worth of Google Ad Grant management and Google Analytics setup. We need to have an incredible creative team and technology chaps to solve all the issues that they run into with syncing five, six different databases and really advanced media buy-in to reach new audiences and have the level of service match the spend.
So they know who our Chief Client Officer is and he leads a bi-yearly impact review with their management team to ensure that our work is creating the results for their programs that we want to have. So those level of services need to happen in order to serve that end of the market that needs that extra attention and the end of the market that needs some help but isn’t quite ready to bring on a full staff to support them.
David (25:51): It’s really smart. The tier ideas definitely makes sense. I also really like the concept that you were winning these big businesses because of your specialization, and one of my favorite business phrases is if you can’t be number one in the category, create a category you can be number one in. And I think that case study just gave us a great example of how do you win by specialization.
Eric (26:13): Yeah.
David (26:14): So I want to ask you about the clients. I have worked with nonprofit clients and I have had some great experiences and I’ve had some not-so-great experiences, and I would say, oftentimes people will say that nonprofits can be somewhat dysfunctional and very challenging to work with. I guess I would just ask maybe broadly, how do you deal with challenging clients? What’s your approach?
Eric (26:37): Well, there are certain challenges that we welcome that come with the territory of working with nonprofits. And some of the challenges that we’re used to and that we welcome is lack of resources, not having as many resources as the for-profit world. That’s not something that we shy away from. We have to be effective. We have to be cost-efficient. We have to be good with our time. Those sorts of things are fine. Some of silo challenges that exists in nonprofits are different than for-profit clients. You’ve got a fundraising team and a marketing team. Those teams don’t talk together. Their goals are tied to each other, but in so many cases, they have their own databases that they use. They aren’t synced. There’s competition amongst the departments. It’s wonderful when they all get along, but even when they really like each other, they don’t have the amount of communication and synchronicity through data that you would want to see as their agency.
So we welcome that challenge because we can be the through line from department to department. We can break down silos. We don’t have to deal with internal politics. So that’s a welcomed challenge for us, getting boards to buy into what executive directors want to do is another challenge that we welcome, and being the support for our clients to get the buy-in. When I say client, the actual relationship that the person that we work with. We call them the client. To get them the support they need to get buy-in from everybody else within the organization. Those are all welcomed challenges.
I think the challenges that aren’t as welcome is when you have difficult personalities. Sometimes there’s a lot ego involved in the nonprofit space. We try to identify that in the sales process and sometimes choose not to go after opportunities that we think it’s going to be a really challenging relationship to manage. So those challenges aren’t as fun to deal with and we try to figure them out along the way and save our teams from those challenges that inevitably come as a result.
David (28:47): I think it’s really interesting that you identify the challenges that you welcome and what strikes me is those are the challenges that an agency that doesn’t focus on nonprofits would not be aware of, and would then be blindsided by and then come to a conclusion that working with nonprofits is a very frustrating experience.You’re basically coming to it with this knowledge and you’re solving the problems before they manifest themselves.
Eric (29:13): Absolutely. And we’re letting the clients know in the sales process that we’re not only aware of these challenges, but we have a track record of solving them. So we talk a lot about breaking down silos within our sales process. As you mentioned before, find out where your niches are, create a niche. I think that’s why we’re able to go head to head with some of the biggest agencies in the world and win, and it’s not that we’re necessarily like smarter or better, but it really does mean something for us to know the industry we work in inside and out.
The nonprofit challenges are not the same. So many people and agencies make the mistake thinking that, like, oh, we’ll also go after some nonprofits. We work with small businesses and nonprofits or B2B and nonprofits. And every once in a while, they can win to the largely unprofitable deals for them. They struggle to do it. A lot of agencies discount the rates thinking like, oh, this will make a great case study. So let’s take them on as a client. And then they deliver mediocre results and piss their team off and struggle with the client, then the agency is like, oh, this is exactly what we do. We know what you’re up against. We know that you just can’t say, well, fundraising is a goal and we managed the goal as a performance-driven agency. So of course we can do your media buying. We can try and certainly anyone can learn this over time. This isn’t like rocket science, but you really have to be dedicated in the space and learn the nonprofit world to be successful. And that’s what allowed us to go from me having this little passion project to an agency of 60 that could very well be 120 in the next couple of years.
David (30:57): You’ve definitely convinced that you do a great job of working with nonprofits and convinced me that most agencies shouldn’t work for nonprofits. Of course, I’m not being explicit. Well, let’s talk about culture a little bit. I guess the first question I’d ask is, you referenced this a little bit, you have core values or core promises in the company that you deliver to your team. Where are they?
Eric (31:20): Yeah, we take our culture really, really seriously. In part that’s because we’ve had some challenges just growing things from the early days of hiring people that can do the work and just having to get them on board when you’re in those single digit person agency and noticing how much one or two bad apples can affect the morale of the team. But also, as you know, in the agency world, all of your employees are the face of the company. And particularly in the early days when you’re relatively small and an account manager leaves the agency, you run the risk of losing that client.
And so it’s essential that you’re thinking about building a culture that fosters continuity of the team. So on average, I think we keep people at our agency for like four-something years, and I think the industry average is about a year and a half. And so recognizing the importance of keeping everybody around in the early days meant the world for us to say how do we create a culture that people don’t want to leave? And so of course we have values and we’ve got a poster like every other agency, and I don’t think it would be that helpful for me to go through it one by one.
One of the really important lessons that I’ll share is that the way I thought about this early on and the way that I shared this with everybody else on my team is that I wanted to build an agency that I wanted to work at. I didn’t want to build an agency that I wanted to be owner of. And if that’s the lens that you look through when you think about culture, and that becomes your north star, that setting vision, is this something that I would be happy about as an employee? And overall, is this an agency that I would want to be on staff for. It’s pretty easy. It’s really not that hard.
So in the process, we have less profits than we would have. We make sacrifices, we make decisions from a management team perspective that maybe favor the staff versus the profit, but if you want to build an agency where you don’t have a lot of turnover, that’s what you do.
David (33:43): That’s a pretty simple north star, but it makes a ton of sense. And I agree with you. When I started my agency, I basically wanted to do the opposite of all the things that annoy me at other companies that I worked at. So not sweating the small stuff, empowering people, no politics, sort of no brainer.
Eric (34:02): One of our employees wrote a blog post last year about how Media Cause was the anti-agency. And this is someone that came from the agency world. And as I said, our team participates in our marketing, writing content, and no one asked this person to write this blog post. She just wrote it on her own. And it was this really like proud papa moment of we’ve created this culture. We’ve reached this point in the last couple of years where we are really doing the opposite of what so many agencies do. And it’s things like this 30-hour work week, billable work week that we have, and a whole lot of other policies that we roll out where it’s pretty clear to the team that we are trying to build something that puts them at the center of our model.
David (34:52): We’ll link to that blog post on the Agentic Shift website. I think the other thing that you reminded me of, I think it was Auren Hoffman who is the founder of LiveRamp and Safegraph, who, I’m not sure it’s his concept, but I think I heard it from him of the thousand-year business. So the concept that you’re building a business that lasts a thousand years. And if you build a business that lasts a thousand years, you do things like sacrifice profit for employee and client satisfaction, and build a business that people are going to want to stay at for years and not months, and you make decisions for the long term basically, which I think, sort of, represents what you’re doing.
So in terms of hiring and trying to find that person who’s going to stay for four years and not four months, what are the characteristics of a great Media Cause hire?
Eric (35:37): One of the first rules that we figured out, we don’t hire people that are looking for jobs. And it seems backwards to say that because if someone is applying for a job, they inherently are looking for a job. We make sure really early on in the interview to make sure that we aren’t a job for them. This isn’t the next job. This isn’t just because they stumbled on it and found a job opening. And it doesn’t mean that every one we hire is gainfully employed and doesn’t actually need the job, but it matters so much that they want to be a part of what we’re building.
And we aren’t just another job. We are their dream job. So that’s essential for us when we’ve had people that have not stayed very long. In a lot of cases, it was them to bouncing from job to job. And you don’t have much of a chance to keep someone around if their mentality isn’t to want to be around a particular job for too long.
Something else that’s important that we think a lot about, our agency is a bit different because we work in the nonprofit space. I always talk about the real split on our team of marketing experience and nonprofit experience. There is a pretty clear divide, right around 50:50, and this makes us so great as an agency in what the clients love about us and the results are the way that they are and keep clients coming back is that we bring that nonprofit mentality to the marketing space, where we know that tactics really well. We felt like world class creatives and amazing media buyers on our team, but when you pair that together with someone that’s actually built an individual giving program at a nonprofit. You see really, really good results.
And so we think a lot in the hiring process of where someone fits into that spectrum, and there’s some risks associated with each. If we have someone from the nonprofit space and we throw them into a client environment where they’re not just working for one organization. Now, they’ve got five clients, and they have got to figure out to split their time across those clients, on occasion, they struggle. It’s just the time management and getting pulled into multiple directions and that’s stressful and they might not be around for that long.
Or on the flip side, if all you’ve done is marketing in your career, sometimes the issue areas that we work in can be pretty heavy and stressful thinking about all the weight of the world when you’re talking about fighting human trafficking, curing cancer and all these other things. So we really have to find out the sales process, like is this person going to be able to go from the nonprofit side to the agency side or vise versa or do they have both those experiences. That would land well for them to be successful with us.
David (38:31): There’s the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs when it comes to your work and someone said there’s a difference between a job, a career, and a calling. A job puts bread on the table, a career advances your work, and a calling is something that you’re mission-driven to do, and I think it sounds like you’re looking for people who are looking for a calling, basically.
Eric (38:50): Absolutely.
David (38:52): So we go to your leadership, if I asked a team member to describe your leadership style, how would they describe it?
Eric (38:58): We had an interesting offsite recently where we learned a lot about each other. I don’t know. It was sort of a game. I think it was called we’re not strangers. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of this. It was something that one of the people in our Ops team brought up, and you break out into different groups and you ask people questions. And it’s not about work stuff, like you are forced to get to know people. And my group is all about first impressions. So I got to hear like five people on the team talk to me about their first impression of me, and then what has changed about that, just from a personality standpoint. So I’ve got a little bit of background on this than I think I can answer.
The consensus was how chill I am compared to every other CEO they’ve ever worked with. And maybe because I’m sitting there in a Hawaiian shirt. I actually live in Hawaii.I’m not going to use big fancy words and act like I know everything. And just hearing from people on the team how welcoming that was that they weren’t intimidated by me. Having a conversation with me was wonderful here because I never want to come off like up on the throne barking orders at people at my company.
So feeling that I was approachable is really important. And that’s largely not just a first impression but part of my management style is to have a very, very open-door policy. I hold an almost-daily office hours with the team, where I block out 30 minutes in my calendar, and anybody on the team can join that office hour for any reason. If you want to talk about anything private, you just have to RSVP to the calendar invite so someone can see so and so’s RSVP. I don’t want to show up because I also have something to talk about that’s private. But if you don’t have anything that’s private, few people can show up and talk and maybe just want to listen.
Half the time I’m sitting there and just like in my inbox working and no one shows up to the office hours. But the other half, people do show up. And I’ve had not senior level employees say what’s your five-year vision for the company. I’m like I love to talk to you about that. Let’s chat. So I think that just level of approachability and openness is really, really helpful in a leadership position. \
And I think it’s something that stands out for me is really just around consensus building. In a lot of cases, I know what I want to do or I have a pretty good idea of what I want to do or I think I know exactly what we need as an organization, but even if I know what needs to happen, in order for it to happen well, there needs to buy-in. You need to have other people that are championing the idea, agreeing with the strategy, or leading certain parts of the strategy.
So I always really try to take a consensus building approach, starting with senior management, asking people what they think about things. And a lot of cases in doing this, I learn things that work on my mind that aren’t on my priority list that are important. So it’s not just about getting people to buy in through consensus building, but learning about priorities along the way and shifting course as a result of it. And not just at a senior management level, but throughout the company as well.
So about once a year, I’ll do some sort of exercise, which is basically designed to flesh out all of the complaints or ideas for improvement that you possibly can. Two years ago, I think we referred to the exercise as papercuts. Let’s go through a papercut elimination process, and over the course of several weeks, we fleshed out all of the little things that were causing just a little bit of pain, but in aggregate, add up. And just little things like meetings are too long, internal meetings, should we cut down the length of that. It’s like we’re able to do things like institute a calendar setting.
So in our company, when you set a 30-minute meeting, it automatically creates a 25-minute meeting. Or if you set an hour meeting, it automatically creates a 50-minute meeting, and that’s just a Google Calendar setting that we put in place. Now you’ve got that extra 5 minutes to look at your inbox or run to the bathroom in between meetings.
So yeah, it’s just consensus building means having a pulse on what’s going on and actually being receptive to what people are telling you and then finding meaningful solutions to it and certainly adhering leadership quality for the team.
David (43:47): There’s a management philosophy called 2 Seconds Lean that’s used in manufacturing primarily, I think. And it’s about finding two-second solutions, put the solvent at eye level rather than on the ground, and you will save five minutes of people fumbling around. That’s kind of your papercuts example. Regarding your consensus building open-door leadership style, were there books or people that inspired you? Is there some inspiration behind that or is that just who you’ve always been? Where does that come from?
Eric (44:15): Yeah, I think it’s something that’s built up over the years of seeing managers that I liked or leaders at organizations that I liked. So certainly a little bit from a handful of people. Unfortunately, I’m not in contact with most of those past managers, so it’s not something that I can continue to learn from them. One person that I follow regularly and continue to learn from around management and leadership is Adam Grant. I don’t know if you’ve read any of his books, but every chance I get, whether it’s a book or a talk, I’ll have a page of notes after listening to him for an hour and things wind up getting implemented into our company as a result of it.
David (45:01): I spent a few days at Google Zeitgeist Conference with Adam Grant, and I guess you could say I didn’t take advantage of the time because we spent all of our time talking about Big 10 football. And he’s a Michigan grad and I’m Iowa grad. I totally missed the boat on asking him about anything other than football. But he seems to be quite a sharp guy for sure.
Two more questions. One is if you could have done anything differently as you grew this agency, what would that have been?
Eric (45:32): Probably so many little things. Few people shouldn’t have been hired, few clients that maybe we shouldn’t have taken on or things that we could have done differently to win pitches, probably could spend an hour just talking about a handful little things. In terms of big things, I don’t know. Growing faster certainly would have been nice. I started this journey 10 years ago, and we’re at a point where we got 60 full-time staff, but I wouldn’t have ever considered the alternative of like just pushing in to take business from CPG companies or car manufacturers in order to get there. I love the niche we’ve created. It’s been so much fun doing that. So I’m one of those lucky people that actually enjoys showing up for work every day. I know that that’s rare, so big picture, I don’t think I would have done a whole lot different.
David (46:29): What advice would you give to someone who wanted to start an agency today?
Eric (46:32): My advice 10 years ago would have been don’t. That was probably my advice to myself, but I think honestly, I wouldn’t do it because it seems like an easier business to create. What I mean by that is you don’t have R&D, you don’t have product development, you don’t have to build an app. You can start by consulting. You can start by offering your skills. And so many agency owners that I see that are struggling to break through the 10-, 12-person agency find it really hard to go from being a consultant with a couple of consultants that work from them to an agency.
So if you’d rather be a consultant, be a consultant. Don’t feel like you have to be an agency is the first piece of advice. If someone really wants to build an agency for reasons other than they like doing the work, I’d say just be really careful to not become a consultancy. We had a rule at Media Cause, and this was when we were four people that we are not a consultancy. We’re an agency. And what we meant by that is if a client called us and asked us to do something, and it wasn’t repeatable, we would say no to it. If we couldn’t train somebody else to do the work, then we were basically being hired as consultants, and there is no scale to that.
So in order to make sure that we were building an agency, we had to say, okay, what do we actually do? Here are the services that we offer, and if someone asked us for something that wasn’t on the service menu, we were allowed to add it to our service menu only if it was something that repeatable that we could do again and again and again. If no, we just said no to it.
David (48:24): Yeah. I have often said that an agency without process is just a bunch of smart people running around doing smart things, and I would modify that to say, an agency without process is a consultancy, to use your language.
Eric (48:34): Absolutely.
David (48:36): Eric, this is great. I congratulate you on your success and also doing good for the world at the same time and moving to Hawaii. Thank you for joining us today.
Eric (48:46): Yeah, my pleasure.
David (48:48): Thanks for listening to this episode of Agentic Shift, an interview with Eric Facas from Media Cause. If you enjoyed the show, please sign up for our newsletter and follow us on social media. Links available at website at agenticshift.com. Talk to you next week.
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