David Canington is co-founder of Ardent Creative, a web design and creative agency based in Fort Worth, Texas. David tells us how past jobs as a car salesman and Christian rock musician influenced his career, why he believes process is more important than the product, why he hires for fit over talent, why he calls back inbound leads within five minutes, and why a prospective employee showed up for an interview in an apron and sent the office fresh cookies.
David Canington is co-founder of Ardent Creative, a web design and creative agency based in Fort Worth, Texas. David tells us how past jobs as a car salesman and Christian rock musician influenced his career, why he believes process is more important than the product, why he hires for fit over talent, why he calls back inbound leads within five minutes, and why a prospective employee showed up for an interview in an apron and sent the office fresh cookies.
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David Rodnitzky (Rodnitzky)(00:02):In this episode of a Agentic Shift, we talked to David Canington, co-founder of Ardent Creative, a web design and creative agency based in Fort Worth, Texas. David tells us how past jobs as a car salesman and Christian rock musician influenced his career, why he believes process is more important than the product, why he hires for fit over talent, why he calls back inbound leads within five minutes, and why a prospective employee showed up for an interview in an apron and sent the office fresh cookies. Enjoy the show.
David, thank you for joining us today on Agentic Shift.
David Canington (Canington)(00:36): I'm glad to be here.
Rodnitzky (00:37): Awesome. Well, I start out by asking folks to tell their founder story. So why don't you tell us how Ardent Creative came to be?
Canington (00:46):Oh wow. That's kind of crazy. Way back, I used to be in a sales job, and I was very frustrated in the sense that in the sales job that I was in, I did very well. I was a decent salesperson. And the thing that I did not like about it is basically every month was from what they call it from here to zero. It's like, you can have a great month, make a lot of money, and then the next month, it's like that never happened. We were never able to build upon what it is you were trying to do. So I was at a dealership and it was actually selling cars. And I went to my boss and said, “I want to start a business. I've got this idea to do this web application with a video.” And I initially started with a purpose of getting into video production. And it just so happened that I had a friend who knew some web development and could do that for me.
So I went to my boss. And if you know anything about the car business, the car business is basically you don't give a notice in the car business. If you go in and tell them, you're thinking about taking another job, they fire you because it's not like you have to worry about handing their clients over to someone else. It's a very easy process. But I went in knowing that I'm going to ask him to become my first client. He's either going to say, yes, I'll become your first client or I was going to be out of a job.
So I went in, presented to him the idea. He thought the idea was great. And a month later, I quit my job and went out and started Ardent Creative. And it was really, really crazy because I was freelancing, was doing everything that every freelancer knows about. Basically you're out trying to get clients, you're trying to manage clients, you're trying to do the work for the job. And then you're trying to do the billing for the job. And it's this whole big process that you're trying to figure out what it is you're doing while you're doing it and trying to build something in the process. And it was really, really crazy.
I can say that in the initial transition from my sales jobs, where I made almost $200,000 a year in my early 20s, I went from making almost $200,000 a year to $12,000 my first year. So mine and my wife's situation was we lived off savings and credit cards to get started. We went through this whole process in the sense that we were still learning how to do what it was we were doing, and slowly started getting referrals for clients to do different things.
And in the beginning, basically if someone says, Hey, can you do this? I'm like, sure, I'll try. And went through this process of doing various things. One time, a person who knew me from somewhere basically said, Hey, I've got this idea for this. Can you build this website? I said, I've never built a website before, but how about we do this? If I do it, you pay me. If I don't, you don't pay me. And so we went through the process and I figured out how to do it. And that's kind of been the process through a lot of things that we have done.
So in 2005, I've gotten my income back to a good level. I'm doing pretty well. And this is two years later, myself and my now business partner. We brought our businesses together. He was more of the design side where I'd send him design work and I would handle more of the technical aspects.
In 2005 we took and we brought our business together. We created this version of Ardent Creative, and we hired our first employee. And it was pretty crazy. We did more our first quarter combined than we did the prior year apart because we optimized processes, figured out different things, and it just kind of took off from there. I remember to this day, that the day that him and I stepped out of our office for the first time. And at this time I think we had two employees and we walked out of our office and I looked at him. I said, “Do you realize that we're still making money while we're not doing work.” And he's like, “Yeah.” That’s kind of a quick synopsis of our founder story. And I've been surrounded by a lot of great people and people that have given us chances to learn throughout the process as well.
Rodnitzky (04:49): Well, your comment about walking out the door and still having making money, I always remind people that Karl Marx said that the essence of capitalism is alienating workers from their labor, which really means that when you have someone working for you at an agency, if you're paying them $10 an hour and you're billing them out at $15 an hour, you're taking some of their labor and profiting from it. But that sounds negative from the Karl Marx perspective, obviously, but that's the essence of capitalism and that's how agencies work. I would just like to ask about the car dealership. My first question is give us a secret of selling cars that the average person wouldn't know.
Canington (05:26):Oh gosh. It's really hard to say at this point because of the fact that the car business, I believe, has changed so significantly from when I did it. And to this point, I personally hate buying cars. I drive an older car just because of the fact I hate going through the process of buying cars. I believe that our money is better spent on things other than cars. And I say that hesitantly because of the fact that we actually have car dealers as clients.
But as far as the secret with selling cars, it's just basically going, knowing what things cost and what you should pay and have your financing lined up and just be willing to walk out the door. Right now it's a little bit more difficult because there is a shortage on vehicles. It's amazing. We drive around and you see car lots and only a third of the car lots have vehicles on them now. So it's now a car dealers’ market more so than it ever has been. And so that might be a little bit more difficult, but when things hopefully get back to normal, I said, don't be afraid to walk out the door.
Rodnitzky (06:26): I also just want to say just because I know you pretty well. I hope this is okay to say that in another life, you also were in a Christian rock band that actually I believe was on nationwide tour and charted on the charts. And is that correct?
Canington (06:41):Yeah. I used to be in a Christian band. I left the band three months before they signed. I knew the band was going to sign, and in the process of everything, my then girlfriend and now wife, I knew that had I stayed in the band, I knew the band was going to move to Nashville, which they did after they signed. I knew that my then girlfriend and now wife, we probably still wouldn't be together. So I think I came out on top. My wife and I are still married, going on 21 years. And the bands currently are not still together, but I got to say going through the process and getting to do that while I was young in my late teens and early twenties was really—I wouldn't give it up for anything because I got to live life as a person on the road and doing that whole thing, whether it's with a Christian band or a secular band or whatever, it doesn't matter. It's still you get to see things from a different lens by doing so.
Rodnitzky (07:37): Yeah. I think a lot of people would love to have that experience. And interestingly, one of the interviews that we already had on this podcast was from a guy who also was in a band. He actually stuck with them when they got signed and then he started an agency. So there's something about being in music that’s connected to agencies, I guess.
Canington (07:52):Yeah. I think musicians are able to have their own level of creativity where me, personally, I'm not a graphic designer. I have graphic designers that work with me, that are just phenomenal. And I have an amazing team that does that, but I'm able to see things through a lens in a similar fashion as a graphic designer because whether I'm able to shift my mindset from the music side of things to that of the business or that of the putting out something visually, I think that the two lend themselves together.
Rodnitzky (08:18): So give me the elevator pitch for Ardent today. What's it in its current iteration?
Canington (08:22):Ardent Creative at this point is a design development and digital marketing company. We've worked with companies from startup to Fortune 500 that we have in-house teams where we can take a brand from start to finish with solely our teams in-house. We have well-defined processes that can help expedite various services that we offer, whether it be branding, whether it be website development, web application, software. One of the big areas that's a big revenue sector for us is we are building a lot of infrastructure for some very large companies that helps their business be more efficient. So we've grown and evolved. And over time we've put the right pieces in the right place to be able to do things that are sometimes difficult for other companies.
Rodnitzky (09:19): Got it. Okay. So you're very process oriented, it sounds like.
Canington (09:22):Very much so. We are very process oriented and our process is like, we step back from what it is that we do on an ongoing basis. And we're always questioning what it is that we are doing and if there's a better way to do it because we believe that we can work to improve and grow on those processes and not just be say, just because we did it this way a year ago that it's still a better way. I tell my team this all the time. It's like, if we're doing the same thing that we did six months ago, we're doing something wrong because I believe technology and platforms and everything that's available out there is evolving at such a rate that we have to be aware of what's coming.
I find it difficult, as I've told you some of the areas that I struggle in understanding in business from the technology side, but I have people on my teams that understand this in a way that I don't even understand it. I believe that we have to have people with a foresight to be able to understand those areas so that we can constantly be looking for the next thing. So we can grow as a company while identifying how we can help our clients grow.
Rodnitzky (10:23): And most of what you're doing is web design, is that right?
Canington (10:26):Web design and application web application development is a big piece of what we’re doing.
Rodnitzky (10:30): So you're a hybrid of technologists and creative folks.
Canington (10:34):Yes.
Rodnitzky (10:36): And how many are at the company currently?
Canington (10:38):At this point, I believe 30 or 31.
Rodnitzky (10:40): So as you think about how the company has gone from you and your co-founder up to 30 people, what were some of the challenges that you encountered initially in scaling the business?
Canington (10:49):Learning how to identify the right person for the right seat? There have been times we've hired people just for the sole purpose to see what happens if we put someone in a role and see if we can identify some efficiencies around it and identifying what works and what doesn't work and having the ability to learn from things that we succeed at, but also better yet having the ability to learn from things that we fail at and identifying how to fail quick and realize that if we did it one way and we failed it that way, then using that as the catalyst to be able to learn how to succeed at it.
Rodnitzky (11:23): So what would be an example of something that you failed at early on that you were able to solve?
Canington (11:29):One thing I think that we failed at early on was between Brad and myself, not being willing to let go of the reigns of a lot of things that I think being in the position or things that we do that we try to control so many things. We were actually having a meeting shortly before this one where Brad and I were talking about identifying next steps for us to add a sales team to our company.
And sure, you know, this as an owner where there's validity when you're talking to an owner of a company and clients want to work with the owners or the main leadership of the company and whatnot, being able to learn how to transfer the knowledge of how to communicate what it is that you do or how you communicate to potential clients. And instead of just hiring a salesperson and throwing their mouth at thinking, okay, well, they can sell X, Y, and Z. Certainly they can sell the same thing for us when ultimately the thing that's got you to where you are at is the fact that I specifically have a vision for the company in how I communicate it. I feel that my team has learned how to voice the vision that I have for the company to my clients.
One of the things that I'm most impressed by is basically a lot of times I'll get on a new client call where one of my account managers will be like, tell us about your company. Tell us about what it is you're doing. And I hear them saying things that I would say in a similar fashion. And that really as a founder of a company really makes me proud because of the fact that I believe our team has caught the vision of what it is we're trying to do and accomplish, and they've realized the way that myself and Brad communicate things to current and new clients is the way that it needs to be done to accomplish the goal.
Now, if they can take that and improve upon it, completely welcome it, but the core values are communicated. And it's the one area that I said I think that we failed at and we've worked to learn from, is I said, just hiring a person and expecting them to sell your company, and it's not always the case.
Rodnitzky (13:38): Yeah. I've always found that founder-driven sales probably gets you the highest conversion rate because the founder obviously has the experience and the passion and clients love the fact that they're talking to the founder, but it's also not scalable. And so you can do that up to certain size. And then at some point you have to rely on other people. And I totally think your approach makes a lot of sense. Having account managers do the sales, that's still a consultative sale. That's someone who is in the weeds and is likely going to work with the client. So it's almost as good as a founder sale, I think.
Canington (14:10):They're not solely doing all the sales. Sometimes clients will come to them from other clients. So we let the account manager continue to take the relationship and nurture that. It's really impressive. Our account director, her name is Elise. She's been with us for a while now. And it is absolutely amazing because sometimes I sit down and hear her talk to clients and hear her reiterate things that we have said over the years. And I feel that she says things more eloquently than I do because I feel that I'm very direct and to the point, and this is how it has to be type thing and she can approach it from a different angle that may be more appreciated by a client. And if she's going to be the person that she's going to be overseeing the team and the project throughout the process, then that works out even better.
Rodnitzky (15:07): Fantastic. One of the challenges I think in sales for agencies, and I think I'm maybe biased here, and I think it's harder for your type of business and my type of business is how do you differentiate the business? And I say that because a lot of what you're selling, especially on the design side, it's kind of subjective. It's like you send a client an example of a website that's orange and blue. And he says, well I like yellow and green, so I'm going to choose someone else.
In the performance space, we have the same challenge in the sense that everyone says, oh, we're going to achieve 600% ROI. And here's a case study that proves it. So there's commoditization on our side as well. Just curious from your perspective, how do you convince a client that you should be the agency when there are thousands of agencies that at least claim on paper to do the same thing?
Canington (15:51):I’m about to use a term that I wish that I could have coined, but I did not. A friend of ours named Ryan coined this term, but I believe he coined the term. He was the first one I heard it from years ago. When I heard him say this, I thought, oh my gosh, that is 100% correct. The process is more important than the product. If all you're trying to do is sell a product, you will quickly be commoditized. If you're selling a process, then there is value that you can demand from that process that will up your overall game. And people are willing to pay more for a process that they believe is going to get them from Point A to point B than they are for a singular product that anybody can just crank out the door.
Rodnitzky (16:29): That's awesome. So when you do your sales, you're showing people a flow of deliverables and methodologies. Is that how you manifest that in sales?
Canington (16:39):In the sales process, basically what is done is like, for instance, we'll get an initial call. Our goal with any time we get a new sales lead, our goal is to get them on the phone in under five minutes or less. And the quicker you can get them on the phone, everyone's like, oh my gosh, I just hit the submit button and you guys are calling me like that. We're not perfect at it, but your closing ratio goes way up. And it doesn't matter if it's a guy that's trying to do just a plain out-the-door website or it's a company that's trying to bring you on as their entire marketing arm for their venture-backed startup. We get through this process of saying, okay, let's learn about your company. Let's take a few minutes and just tell me what it is you're trying to accomplish and see if it's something that we can come to that’s a fit.
At the same time, you're trying to learn a little bit about the person that you're dealing with. I believe it's like a 33%, 33%, 33% process where 33% of the time you're talking about what it is that you're doing, the other 33% you're talking about money, and the other 33% you're talking about the client where you're learning and you're trying to make it personal with the client.
Going through that process, you're digging into what's important to them and trying to find the values that are important to them. Out of that process, you basically say, oh, we have this, for example, which is our war room process for developing a website. You can go to Wix, Squarespace, and get something done for super cheap and it's going to be this, but there's going to be holes that are going to be missed in the design and development. And there's things that aren't done, which is the reason why you're coming to us. And you're selling the value of basically how you're getting them from Point A to point B instead of trying to put a dollar value on the end process.
And when we say, okay, we do these 10 things up front and these are the steps we take, and then once we get to here, we get everyone in the room and everything is done right in front of you. You get to be a part of the design and development process. And when they hear that, they're like, oh my gosh, because end of the day, sending emails back and forth with PDF previews and do you like this? I don't like that. And all being communicated over a Slack channel or being communicated back and forth in email, whatnot, it's just not efficient.
We figured out how to take something where six, seven years ago, before we started doing this, a simple 10-page website could take a year because getting the client to provide us what we needed and the whole back-and-forth process, it took forever. But now it's like, we go through this process and this is your outline. This is exactly where you're at. This is what you can expect at this point and have it well diagramed out as far as where you're at in all these steps. And once you get to this point, you get to come in and work with our team of designers and developers, and they will take and work all these pieces out with you so that there's none of the back and forth where it's like, I don't know about this. I don't know about that. They work that out with you and things are done in days instead of months or years.
Rodnitzky (19:40): Yeah. So quality over quantity or performance over price. In my days of doing sales, I liked your 33%, 33%, 33%, but I actually would say that my sales approach was always 60% talk about the client. Have the client tell me about the business and really understand and ask a lot of questions about the business. 30% explain a potential solution to their challenges. So I listen to you for the last 20 minutes. Here's what I'm thinking is probably what's going to benefit you. And then the last 10%, talk about price and whatnot. In fact, in many cases, I would find on the first call, there was never any talk about price. It was just about, can we come up with solutions that sound interesting enough to have a second conversation?
Canington (20:24):Yeah, I like that. And then at the very end, when you've done your 60% upfront, where you've learned about the client, you always bring the hook back around where you close the conversation with something that was a takeaway from your initial point in the conversation. So they walk out the door knowing that you're thinking about them and not just, Hey, this is going to be a big sale.
Rodnitzky (20:43): And I actually always take phone calls with, we've got 30 minutes on the calendar. And if I find out in the first 5 minutes that the potential client isn't a fit for us, I'll tell them that. But I'll also say, listen, we've got 30 minutes. What problems can I solve for you? Can I introduce you to a better agency? Do you want to talk about an issue that you're having and I can suggest some solutions? I feel like whether it's a hot lead or a dud lead, if you end the call with someone feeling like you were paying attention to their needs and providing value, it pays itself forward in many ways.
Canington (21:14):Oh, I agree. I had a conversation with a potential client just yesterday and we were not a fit as far as money wise, but I believe the client's idea as far as what it is that he was looking to accomplish and what he was looking to build, I believe that there was a great deal of value there. And I told him flat out, Hey, I think your idea is sound. You've already done a lot of the work and fleshing out your overall idea and what it is you're trying to accomplish. And I believe there's value here. We may not be a fit as far as dollars and cents, but what I would tell you is feel free to contact me for any reason if you have any questions as it relates to the business side. And if there's anything I can do to help point you in the right direction, don't hesitate to reach out because that guy that may not be a fit today, six months, a year, or whatnot down the road, if you keep the conversation going, it may turn into something later on down the road.
Rodnitzky (22:12): Exactly. We had a client many years ago that was paying us $500 a month, which was pretty small amount of money, even at the time. And after like a month of working with them, I called up the contact and said, you know what? This isn’t even worth $500 of your money because it's just not working. And she was like, so appreciative. She's like, thank you. I'm just glad that you're just looking out for me. And then like three months later, she left and went to a very large company and hired us. Sometimes karma does come around, which is nice.
So speaking of clients, one question I always like to ask people is how do you deal with challenging clients? What would you consider a challenging client?
Canington (22:53):A challenging client, I think I'm going to use your words here. A challenging client is someone who expects different results, but ties your hands in relation to the processes or things that you can do to try to accomplish the results. I think you and I have had a conversation in the past where we were talking about challenging clients and we've had one very large client that there were 10 things what took to run a successful marketing campaign for the client. Because the client was a very large client and had a parent agency that held the keys to the kingdom for all the smaller divisions of the company. They would only allow to do 3 or 4 things from the marketing realm to try to deliver results. It's sort of demand results but tie your hands in the process to accomplish those results.
So at the end of the day, all we can do is what we're allowed to do and try to communicate how we can try to move the ball forward based upon what it is that we're given the freedom to do. So I think identifying those clients that want results, but they give you the rules and the only way that you can get those results is easily is problematic.
Rodnitzky (24:01): Yeah, for sure. That is always a challenge. I sometimes say the customer is always right unless they're wrong, but then they still may be right. Which means as an agency, your job is to provide amazing service and to do what the client wants, but sometimes what the client wants or how the client's acting is not beneficial to their own good. So they're getting in their own way. And so you have an obligation to tell them that they're wrong and that they should change their ways, but at the end of the day, if you said your piece and they still want to do things in an incorrect way, you have a choice. You either have to just go along with that and say, okay, well this is going to be suboptimal or you have to let the client go. But I think a lot of times where agencies maybe go wrong is they feel scared or they feel like if they contradict the client, they're going to get in trouble or get fired. But contradicting the client is sometimes the only way to get things done right for the client.
Canington (24:50):I agree. I remember one time we had this one client and the client is actually a friend of mine.
Rodnitzky (24:57): That's always trouble.
Canington (24:58):That’s always trouble. Well, he was a client first and he became a friend over several years. We helped him with a political campaign. We helped him in several seats that he held. And we went through that whole process with him. And one day he felt the need to get on the phone with my account director and speak to her in a very, very negative fashion. And it was one of those tough decisions where we had to call them up and say, I'm sorry, you can't be a client anymore because this is not how I speak to anybody on my team in my office. And if you're going to speak to anyone like that, you better bring it to me, and then we'll deal with that, but you do not speak to my team that way.
And I have to say, my team really appreciated that because of the fact that one, they knew he was a friend of mine who he threw up. The thing is basically, I'm going to have a conversation with David after this and you're going to be fired. He said something like that to my account director. And it became obvious to our team after we let him go that, Hey, David and Brad, they really do have our back. And they're willing to fire this guy as a client who we know is his friend and been with us for 12 years. And he probably sent us several hundred thousand dollars a year in referrals with new big clients. And we were willing to give that up because of the fact that he treated someone on our team poorly. I think that got a lot of appreciation from our team because they realized how hard it was for us.
Rodnitzky (26:28): That's great. I, one time, didn't fire a client fast enough and we lost probably five or six people on the team. And by the time I fired the client, after that, we lost five or six more because I just didn't do it fast enough. But I will say that my favorite story along these lines, which my team has heard a million times is we had a client many years ago who was a medical malpractice law firm, complex medical malpractice. It was a husband and wife team. The husband was the JD/MD and the wife was in charge of marketing. She would send the team all these text messages like in the middle of the night. In all caps, they would say things like I did not authorize these keywords. Who approved this ad text, you know, just on and on.
And so the team was just getting frustrated. I said, all right, listen, I'm going to let the client go. So I called up the client and I'm just going to make fictitious name here. I said, Mary, I don't think we're fit for you. I think you want someone who's going to be more like a just do what you want versus strategic. I think you just need someone different. And she said, “Are you firing me?” And I said, “Well, let me just ask you a question. When your husband's preparing for a major complex medical malpractice lawsuit, I'm assuming that when he's doing his legal research and scientific research, he presents the arguments and the science to his clients before trial.” And she goes, “Are you kidding? Our clients don't know anything of about medical practice.” And I said, “Well, now you know how we feel?”
And she actually turned around and became one of the nicest clients and flew our team to Mexico and gave them iPads. And she just needed to hear from someone that she was not having a good tone. And she was speaking about stuff that she really wasn't an expert at. So anyways, that's my favorite challenging client story.
Canington (28:04):I really like that. That's really strong. I think that if we can convince more clients that not everything is as easy as it's perceived to be, if we can do our job in convincing clients of that, then I think the process can go a lot smoother and be better for our teams.
One thing that we had to identify quickly was we had a client fly in from Boston for one of our web development war rooms. In the process, we thought, oh, this is going to be a great client. They understand development. They understand how this goes. They're going to appreciate everything. And it became overly apparent that once they got in the room, they could not make a decision. And they sat in the room for the first four days A/B testing headlines on Facebook. And we couldn't get past the homepage of a 45-page site because they could not make a decision.
So through that learning process in our sales process, when we're talking about building a website or something where we go through our process, they say when you get in the room, your job is to make a decision. You're going to be presented with option A, option B. And if you can't make a decision, you do not need to be there. And we try our best to communicate that up front. We basically say you don't have more than these many people. You at least have three people so that two people can overrule one person and you need to be fine with being overruled if it's something where someone on your team says, option A is better than option B.
And we learned that early on and we had to identify and learn how to communicate that to clients in such a way so that when every time they get to that step in the process, that if they freeze up, it's going to potentially draw out the process longer and cost them more money or they're going to realize that they do not need to let perfection get in the way of progress.
Rodnitzky (29:54): There's a coach in Silicon valley. And I think his name is Bill Campbell and he passed away recently. One of his famous phrases was the job of a leader is to break ties. So as a leader, you can't just assume that the team's going to figure it out. Sometimes you just have to make a decision and that's what leadership is. So I think that's similar to what you were just talking about.
Canington (30:15):I like that. That's good.
Rodnitzky (30:16): Let ask you about the culture at Ardent. So do you have any core values or core promises that you live by with the team? We talked about some of the ways that you certainly stand up for your team, which is great. Other codified core values?
Canington (30:30):Yeah. Some of our core values in what it is that we do at Ardent, we've done an effective chunk communicating this, I believe our team’s life outside the office is more important than the life inside the office, because if they can't find balance at home with their family, they're going to bring that stress to work. And that's going to have an effect on our business. It's going to have an effect on the work that they produce for us. We try to promote a balance with- you heard of the term, the work-life balance and all that stuff as like we're not perfect at it. And I don't believe any company is, but it is always top of mind in everything we're doing. And we make a conscious effort to be aware of the challenges that we face and realize, Wow, we did that wrong today. Or we shouldn't have done this.
And I found out something just yesterday that a mistake that we made last year with an employee that was like, wow, I wish we could go back and redo this because the fact that it was effect on an employee's life and that matters to me. We take an ownership mentality of the clients that we choose to work with. If you come on as a client of ours, it's not just basically let's see how much we can get a billable for this client. It's basically, we look at everything that we spend for them as far as from the marketing side and every dollar that is built to them hourly based upon design and development and any other services we provide. We're like, is this actually going to take and provide value and point towards a positive ROI for the client.
And ultimately, we look to build and maintain solid relationships with not only our team but our clients that work with us and bring us into their offices and work with their team so that just knowing that we are all in it together, basing the fact that we know that our company is going to grow as our clients grow.
Rodnitzky (32:15): That's great. What do you look for in your team when you hire your team members, and how are these values related to how you make hiring decisions?
Canington (32:23):I've been given some issues over this in the sense that when we say we hire for fit over talent, I believe that you can identify someone with a great deal of talent, but if you're going to hire someone and they're going to come in and cause strife and dissension and a lot of issues internally in your office, it's not worth it. And at the same time, you have to be able to be willing to identify those issues and be willing to make the hard decisions very, very quickly when those issues may arise.
Rodnitzky (32:54): Well, I think obviously you want to hire for fit and talent in a perfect world. Just a really great cultural person who doesn't have any talent would be a challenge.
Canington (33:03):Yeah. They have to be able to accomplish what it is that you want them to do. I'll give you a perfect example. We were hiring for my executive assistant and we were interviewing all these capable candidates, and this one person came in. She had a master's degree in psychology on paper. She had everything. It was like, wow. Like her resume was really impressive as it relates to what it is she wanted to do that, what she was going to do for us. And I expedited the process. Oh my gosh, this is the person. This is the person. She seems really sharp.
So I basically brought in my creative director. I need to do a second interview. And this is right off of the first interview. It's like first interview. It's like, I sort of expedited the process. You've got an hour. I'm going to let you meet the rest of the team because I was that impressed by her initially as far as her credentials and everything that she had going for her.
At the same time at the back of mind, it's like, why is this person with the master's degree in psychology? And she's worked at this university as a teacher and done all this other stuff. And I was like, why did she want to come be my assistant? I couldn't get past that. But it was all still fine. It was like, this is the person we're going to hire. I said, okay. I've got two more interviews that I've got to do right after this. They're already scheduled. I don't want to cancel. I want to keep my commitment, and I want to take and meet these people because they're already on the books. She goes, Okay. But I said, you'll probably be getting a call from us in the next two days because everyone really likes you and we think that we could possibly bring you on.
And the next person that walked in, sat down in front of us, the interview was done in like five minutes because the fact, one, of the questions that we times ask is we say, okay, can you tell us what it is that we do?
Rodnitzky (34:45): You're a business. You make business, you make money.
Canington (34:47):It was like deer in headlights. It's like she didn't even look at our website. She didn't have a clue. Interview was over in five minutes. The last person we interviewed, her name is Megan. She sits down and we start talking. And 30 minutes later was like, oh my gosh, this interview's gone 30 minutes. And was like, we didn't even realize it. And we're talking. And I bring in my creative director and I said, you got to meet this person. He starts talking to her. And then I said, I brought in someone else said, you got to meet this person. He starts talking to her. She's completely capable. She's been absolutely amazing since we've got her. But as far as her personality and the way she fits in our office with the team and her willingness to learn and grow and step into roles based upon what it is we need, that was quickly identified in that process even though that someone else had better qualifications and a better resume, and probably on paper, more talent than this person did.
And she has then stepped up and she has, like I said, learned areas of our business and taken on areas of our business that she's really not so much my executive assistant anymore. She helps run areas of the business now that are really, really important to us because of the fact that end of the day, she just gets it done. And she does it with a smile. She cares about everyone. And that's an example where we literally hired for fit over talent. And still to this day, we brag about the fact that it's like, okay, yeah. I hired Megan. I hired Megan. She's my hire.
Rodnitzky (36:14): That's awesome. I hired an executive assistant who ended up getting promoted to run all of our events, our conferences and everything. She was fantastic. I also will say that about the person who comes in and doesn’t know what your business is doing. I have adopted the brown M&Ms approach. You may be familiar with this, which is that David Lee Roth, the lead singer of Van Halen would always put in his concert writer the list of requirements before the concert. At the bottom of the writer, he would say there must be a bowl of only brown M&Ms in the dressing room. And he knew that if he walked into the dressing room and there wasn't a bowl of brown M&Ms, that someone was lacking attention to detail. And so that can lead to, for example, electrical wires, not being grounded on stage and getting electrocuted or whatnot.
So he would refuse to play if there weren't brown M&Ms. And so what we would do in our postings is have this long posting and at the bottom of the posting, we would say also to make sure you read the whole post, your application must have the subject line, I am the best person in the world for this job or something. We'd make something up because if they were just applying to 50 jobs as quickly as they could, that would show.
And even for this podcast, I hired some folks to do editing of the audio. And I did it on Upwork. And at the bottom of the post, I said, you must respond to this question or I will not even consider your application. And I would get in the first 15 minutes of posting it, you get 40 responses because people think the faster you respond, the better, which I know that's part of your philosophy for responding to leads, but they didn't even bother to pay attention to what the tech said. And I was like, okay, these people are not the people I want.
Canington (37:50):Whenever we start a new job post on the career section of our site, one job post that's always running, it says volunteer cookie baker. Our last account manager that we've hired. Her name is Rebecca. And in the Zoom interview that she was going through, in her first interview, I wasn't on that but I've heard the story, basically she showed up in a Zoom interview in an apron with flower and everything in the Zoom interview. It's like, oh, well, I'm here for the meeting, but I want to let you know, I'm taking care of the cookies, too. And then my team actually received boxes of cookies. So it's like identifying those things and she's been a great hire. And it's been really, really impressive. Seeing the people that take the time to learn about your company and want to come in and not only see it as a job, but want to see how they can improve and help it grow and help you get to where you need to be.
Rodnitzky (38:45): What's crazy about that is it probably cost her a total of $50 and an hour and a half of time to make and deliver those cookies, but it changed her life. She got a job. So many people just don't go above and beyond. That's not even that hard, but she created a memorable moment that you'll remember for the rest of your life and that got her a job.
Canington (39:03):Yeah. On National Bosses’ Day, I think, she actually sent me a box, I don't know if they have this in California, but here in Texas have a thing it's called Tiff’s Treats where they deliver cookies to your house and the cookies are still hot from the oven. Now I'll tell you, I am not a cookie person. I don't like cookies. It's not her fault for not knowing this. It's completely fine, but my wife loves cookies. My kids love cookies. And my wife is like, “Who's this from?” I said, “This is from Rebecca.” She goes, “You are never firing that woman.”
Rodnitzky (39:41): Cookies are a good strategy in most cases in life. I agree with that. We're changing topics, what do you think the future of agencies? What are you excited about and what are you worried about?
Canington (39:52):That's a question that we are constantly having conversations about at this point. I'll speak to it from the technology standpoint. Like I said earlier, I believe that technology right now is evolving so fast that agencies that are of any size are going to have a difficult time in keeping up because I equate any large business or anything that's basically, you've got this machine that's running and there's all these things that you continually have to do to maintain machine in motion. And it's hard to take and deviate from the things that you know that are going to continue to propel it forward.
But being able to identify when those things are going to end are really, really difficult. So a lot of times, large companies, agencies and the like, we can see what's coming, but sometimes we don't want to jump on the bandwagon or be willing to pivot or change course because of the fact we get so comfortable in doing the same thing that we know as a revenue generator for now.
But suddenly the rug gets pulled out from under it, and it's kind of like, oh crap. Now we have to figure out how to do it. Now we have to figure out how to get it done. And it's a challenging issue because I don't know. I think technology-wise as it relates to crypto, AI, and just the Web 3.0 or even the metaverse, being aware of what is going to be the final platform that's going to be adopted. We have to constantly try to keep that on our radar as far as what's going to be the wildly adopted platform that everyone starts using so that we can start building on it.
I heard a guy talking today where he basically made the comparison in the crypto world. If you're comparing the crypto world to a baseball game, in the crypto world, everyone is still in the locker room and they're not even in the dugout getting ready to start the game. And basically the opportunity is still there. And when it gets to the point across the board where the platforms get it down to where everything is one click or it's easier to go in and buy and transfer and use it even at the level that it is right now, then it's even going to be more widely adopted, and it's just going to take off even more so than it is right now.
Web 3.0, I'm not going to put myself out there and say, I'm an expert on this or I know the everything there is to know about it. A thing I know as an agency leader is the fact that I need to know what it is that I don't know, and I need to be able to be aware and be ready to shift resources in my company or be willing to allocate resources in areas that may not be a profit generator at this point to keep looking for those things that are coming so that when something does shift, that we already have our feet in the water.
Rodnitzky (42:46): Yeah. These are big issues. I bought my kids an Oculus Quest, so I think that covers my investment in the metaverse for now. But it is funny because I still remember when just getting onto the internet was a big deal. We really moved on from that. Let me ask you two more questions since we're almost out of time. The first question is just, do you have any favorite marketing or leadership books that you always recommend to people?
Canington (43:10):One of the books I read early on I felt was great The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding. That was great. And then another book that I read that wasn't so much a marketing book that I really, really liked that really stuck in my head was I read the Steve jobs book where it was the biography of him. And it was kind of like one of these things. I had this conversation with my wife the other day, because we're talking about our kids, and where you get to hear about Steve jobs from the standpoint of his reality distortion field. And one thing that I feel that I've taken from that is, and still to this day is like, we have to see the opportunity. We have to believe that something can get done. We have to motivate people to get things done and find the way to make it happen even when everyone tells you it can't be done.
And you may not be there now, but at some point when all the pieces fall in place and you're able to be there when the stars align and bring it all together, because like all the things that happen from the Apple side of things, the reason why I'm doing what it is right now is because I saw someone with an iMac and iMovie, and I thought, you know, I can do that. And that's what made me think I can take and make videos and I can do this.
There were so many instances where I believe where in the process of him doing what he was doing, where people told him it couldn't be done, that it's never going to happen. And I don't want to say he willed into existence or he made everything come together, but basically I believe the reality distortion field is one of the things that brought things into existence that so many people never would have saw or never would have thought to make happen.
Rodnitzky (44:51): I haven't read that book. It's been on my nightstand for about seven years now.
Canington (44:54):It's a great book. In the book, it makes him out to be an absolute genius and absolutely crazy at the same time. And there's that fine line between the two where there literally were things that people were telling him, you can't do this. And he made it happen in spite of that.
Rodnitzky (45:14): All right. Well, after I finish Ready Player One, which is basically about the metaverse, maybe I'll finally finish the Apple book. It does sound great.
Canington (45:21):I read it years ago and I read in like a week and it got my wife mad because I'd come home from work at night. And I literally sit on the couch and I'd be reading all night and not paying attention to anything else because it was one of those books. It was amazing. And so I thought it was a great book.
Rodnitzky (45:41): All right. My last question to you is what advice would you give to someone who's starting an agency today?
Canington (45:47):I would say if you're starting an agency today, identify the things that you are really good at and quickly learn how to source out or have other people do the things that you are not. In the beginning when you're starting a business, don't think that there's anything wrong with trying to take and invest as much money back into the business. It's hard in the beginning. You get up and you're grinding and you're trying to make a living and you're trying to provide for your family and trying to do those things. But in the beginning, like you're figuring out what it is you're doing. And through that process of figuring it out, what it is you're doing, you need to be willing to identify what it is that you're not good at. Because once you identify those things, then you can learn how to source that out to someone else.
I'll give you an example with me and Brad. Brad and I, we were friends prior to us doing the agency thing. And he was a key help in me getting started because he was already freelance designing and doing that whole bit. And I went to him one time. I was like, you know, how can I do what it is that you do? Because I knew that I had to do something and Brad was a key help in helping me get one of my first clients beyond the car dealership. And a lot of those things where you're still figuring out what it is you do, he's now the side of the business and handles the things that I don't do well. Brad's the culture guy. Brad's the team building. Brad handles the accounting, he deals with the CPAs and the attorneys. He handles a lot of the side of the business that I don't want to handle.
I'll tell you when I was freelancing, I would bill every three months when I needed money instead of billing every month religiously because of the fact that I would almost rather do work for free than to open QuickBooks. So I quickly identified what it is that I didn't want to do if I were going to continue doing this. And like with Brad, I tell people this. I gave him half of my business so that I didn't have to open QuickBooks. And I'm completely fine with that because Brad is a strength in the area that I'm not.
And I'll tell you, this one thing with partners is a big deal. And I can preach to this all day long because I hear people that have bad partners and all this other stuff is like. I'd say with partnerships, you just go in and you have a conversation basically. Sometimes we are going to disagree and you're not going to like what I say, but that's okay. At the end of the day, we have to know that we're both working to get to the same goal.
So to this point, 16 years in business, we're going on 17, Brad and I, every decision we've made that's been a major decision that's required both of us, if we disagree, one of the two of us is completely fine with saying, okay, I trust your decision-making process. And I'll trust you in this even though that I may not agree. And one of us always is willing to trust the other one in knowing that we're trying to get to where we need to get to. And if we're wrong and we fail at it, what do we do? We learn from the process and we go the other way, but we don't let that get in the way of where we let egos get in the way of partnerships and think that, oh, he's got it out for me. That's never been the case. We've always been aligned on the same page. Even though that there are a lot of things we don't agree on, but at the end of the day, we always have each other's back because of the fact that I trust him wholeheartedly, because decisions he makes has an effect on my life and my family and mine vice versa with him.
Rodnitzky (49:19): That's impressive, especially because there are actually a lot of agencies and businesses, frankly, that start out with some form of partnership or leadership group and end up dissolving because the partners can't find consensus. So I think the fact that you guys have been able to agree to disagree for 15 years is fantastic. And it also just speaks to the notion of what you said before about hire for fit over talent. I mean, it's probably the same with your partner. You got to find a partner that's a fit for you, not just a partner who's a genius at something.
Canington (49:52):And like I said, he very much has stepped in and he's been in a strength in areas that I am not and myself vice-versa. I handle things that he doesn't want to handle and he handles things that I don't.
Rodnitzky (50:01): That's awesome. Well, David, this has been great. We didn't get to about half the questions. So some point in future, I'll have to get you on for another episode, but thank you. Thank you for joining us and continued success with Ardent Creative.
Canington (50:13):Thank you so much, sir. I appreciate the opportunity to be on here with you. And I know the world that you work in and live in, and I am honored by the opportunity to share the stage.
Rodnitzky (50:24): Feeling is mutual. A new episode of Agentic Shift drops every Wednesday. Subscribe on your favorite podcast or visit agenticshift.com to see the latest episode.
Links
The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding—book by Al Ries and Laura Ries