Martin Woolley is CEO of The What’s Possible Group, a London-based marketing group focused on growing dynamic emerging brands. Martin tells why he embraces making mistakes and the power of black box thinking, why he likes the Goffee and Jones culture model, why he’d say no to Coca Cola (and most other large companies) as a client, why he believes agencies are in the client happiness business, why he emphasizes passion, inquisitiveness, caring and knowledge with his team, and he even recommends a great indie rock band that everything should be listening to!
Martin Woolley is CEO of The What’s Possible Group, a London-based marketing group focused on growing dynamic emerging brands. Martin tells why he embraces making mistakes and the power of black box thinking, why he likes the Goffee and Jones culture model, why he’d say no to Coca Cola (and most other large companies) as a client, why he believes agencies are in the client happiness business, why he emphasizes passion, inquisitiveness, caring and knowledge with his team, and he even recommends a great indie rock band that everything should be listening to!
Black Box Thinking, a book by Matthew Syed
David Rodnitzky (David) (00:05): In this episode of Agentic Shift, we talked to Martin Woolley, CEO of the What’s Possible Group, a London-based marketing group focused on growing dynamic emerging brands. Martin tells us why he embraces making mistakes and the power of black box thinking, why he likes the Goffee and Jones culture model, why he’d say no to Coca-Cola and most other large companies as a client, why he believes agencies are in the client happiness business, why he emphasizes passion, inquisitiveness, caring, and knowledge with his team, and he even recommends a great indie rock band that everybody should be listening to right now. Enjoy the show.
Martin, thanks for joining us today.
Martin Woolley(Martin) (00:45): Real pleasure to be with you. Nice to see you again.
David (00:48): Yeah, nice to see you. We’ve known each other for probably seven or eight years. I think we used to share a love of indie rock. I’m totally out of the scene. I’m getting old, so we probably can’t spend a whole hour talking about indie rock. So we’re going to have to talk about agency stuff.
Martin (01:01): Yeah. That’s fair enough. If I dry up on agencies, then we can get into it with the rock bands.
David (01:06): Okay. Good. That’s our Plan B. So we’d love to start out by just letting people know that the name of your agency is What’s Possible Group. Tell us what the elevator pitch of the What’s Possible Group is, and then maybe from there, we’ll backtrack into how it all began.
Martin (01:25): Of course. What’s Possible Group is, we created a group so that we could expand and fill the various different needs of our particular client group. And it’s actually quite a broad client group, but our contention is it’s kind of underserved. We called it dynamic growth brands. These are businesses that are on a growth trajectory. They’re normally trying to take bites out of the market with larger competitors in it.
If you look at the way most of the marketing services world and I’d include Trade Press and everything, the way that they’re structured is it’s kind of polarized. Most of the world is created for the big guys, which makes perfect sense. It’s where most of the money is. So the corporates are really well-served and most agency groups and most agency structures mirror the needs of that particular client side.
On the other end of the spectrum, startups have got whole ecosystems built around them as well. If you’re a startup, you’re not short of where to go for advice, where to go for services that are attuned to your particular needs, your particular size, and the stage of growth that you’re at. But if you’re in the middle, no one’s there for you.
Actually, of course, when we were thinking about this, we were looking at who are we really good at, and tended to click with those kinds of businesses. So that’s what we build around. It’s the dynamic CMOs and their teams and those businesses are always moving too fast. They need a partner that’s there solving their problems, that’s not bothered about staying in their swim lane and all the rest of it, the ones that sit with them and solve their problems. And if we can be that person and share that growth journey, that’s a really exciting place to be. That’s what we do.
David (03:07): You are soup to nuts service provider in terms of direct response to brand, online to offline, UK to the world? Where do you fit in, in that perspective?
Martin (03:17): The aim is you can’t be everything to everyone, right? But we can try and be everything to those people, to those brands particularly. So that’s what we’re trying to do. Normally, what we find is that a dynamic growth brand has normally got an internal tussle going on. Typically they’ve scaled the business sometimes to a really significant level using primarily performance-led marketing. Quite often, they control that themselves, do it in-house, but not always. You get to a point where you have to jump the fence and you have to start luring in some brand if you want to continue that level of growth.
Time and time again, we see we might be working for multi-billion pound or dollar PLCs, but they could still be owner operated. And you’ve got a CMO coming in. They get a shiny CMO from somewhere that’s built a really good brand. They know they need to do it, but when it comes to it, they’re just at loggerheads. They can’t agree on the tactics, the metrics, how long the pay rate’s going to be, all of that kind of stuff. So we try and work in the middle there and keep both sides happy. Primarily that’s about agreeing what their suite of metrics is that we all agree on, and then let’s try and show them as we go different types of work how we’re moving those different levers.
So that’s that question, domestic or international? Well, we’ve got a domestic media agency. The Specialist Works which is our original brand, and we’ve also essentially spun out those services into a very focused business called Hubble, and Hubble is specifically, as the name implies, for hub marketers.
Our biggest client there is a company called NordVPN, which is an internet security provider. Those guys have a large marketing team in Vilnius in Lithuania. It could be anywhere in the world. They operate all of their different markets from there, and that’s comes with a whole load of different challenges because you can’t manage an agency in every territory. And if you go to a network, they’re just not built for you, as the name implies. They’re built for companies that have got feet on the ground in all kinds of different businesses.
Plus you’ve got your translation challenges. You’ve got to deliver across markets at the same time. You need common planning methodology, common metrics that need to be able- all of that stuff. So we try and look at these specific challenges that our clients has. We build around it. That’s our opportunity.
David (05:46): Totally makes sense, and I totally agree with you, that notion that if you’re working with a giant holding company, while it sounds great that they have 100 offices around the world, you’re paying for those offices as opposed to paying for results. And you could so much more nimble and effective with your model.
I guess, a two-part question I would ask you is, first of all, I think it’s somewhat easy to say no to a start-up. If somebody comes to you and says, look, I don’t have the budge now, but maybe someday, I will. Can you dedicate half your staff to me? Okay, that’s fine. Part A of the question is what happens if Coca-Cola comes to you and you said, we’re in the middle. In the Goldilocks analogy, we’re the just right. We’re not the too big, too small. Do you actively say no to large clients?
And then the second part of the question is what happens if one of your clients goes from the middle to the top? Is there a point where you proactively reach out to them and say, you know what, you guys have kind of moved to a different stratosphere, and maybe we’re not a fit anymore?
Martin (06:41): Both really good questions. The first one’s the easy one to answer. If Coca-Cola opened the door, we’re absolutely not right for them. That’s simple. You have to understand where you own strengths and weaknesses are, and dealing with big corporates is just not what we’re set up for. We’re like our clients. We’re dynamic, we’re agile, we do things that Coca-Cola don’t need and don’t value. Before now we’ve turned an ad around, creative and media and on air in three days. There’s no way Coca-Cola ever need that.
So the fact that we could do that is useless to them, but it’s really important to some of the clients that we deal with. And Coca-Cola would be no fun, no fun to work. You got to have some fun. So there’s that.
Your second point, is there a point at which our clients outgrow us? I get asked this one quite a lot. It’s a really, really good question. And honest answer is I don't know. Let’s find out. But 10 years ago, there’s no way we could have handled the clients we handle now. The thought that we could handle clients with a $25 million budget, there’s no way we could have done that then. But we’ve done it true to our principles and we can handle those clients now. And, of course, we want to stay on that journey. Our whole business model is to stay on the journey as long as possible with the clients that are right for us. That’s what it is all about.
So I don’t know if we will reach that point, but I think it’s quite a way off, and we’re going to have fun getting there.
David (08:09): Yeah. It’s great that you’re true to your journey. And I do find at my agency that we’ve had some clients that have gone from middle to big, and it is really hard to say goodbye proactively, but oftentimes, in hindsight, you realize that the team is miserable, and that there’s just a lot of friction that’s been caused. At the end of the day, when a company gets to the point where they need a holding company, they don’t really need agility at that point. Like you said, Coca-Cola doesn’t care if your ad is up in an hour or three weeks.
Many years ago, I talked to a search agency that was managing, I think, Ford, one of these—GM, I think. And I said well, what do they spend on paid search. Oh, they spend $2 million a month. Okay. How many people do you have managing that account? We have 24. Like what are they doing? That doesn’t make any sense.
And said well, this particular car brand, the Buick Lesabre, they need their own brand manager and the Chevy Volt needs their own brand manager. And it’s not about performance. It’s about the politics of the organization. Anyways, it’s a challenge for the agency.
Martin (09:09): Yeah. Totally. And of course, you specialized brilliantly in digital as well. So you’ve got a, if you like, a vertical specialization. You’d agree with that characterization. We try and go totally horizontal. Our clients, well, from every sector, from every business model, but they share those growth challenges. So there’s no harm in being true to that because there’s so much world to go for, right? Let’s just get really good at these guys.
David (09:35): Yeah, absolutely. Let me backtrack. I just want to hear a little bit about your founder story because I think you were brought in as CEO, and then you bought the company in the management buyout, and then you also subsequently changed the company name and grew and acquired some businesses. Maybe give us just a little background of how that all happened.
Martin (09:52): It’s all getting to be quite a while ago now. I joined 15 years ago. I was working for a big company then. I was a media owner side working for News Corp and not enjoying it. Most people weren’t enjoying it. That was before we used to characterize working in that big business. Most people couldn’t wait. 5:29, they were queuing at the elevator trying to get out of it.
And then I met the founder of the original business, and I started doing a bit of business with him, started supporting them in their growth journey. And every time I went into their little shared office, I think you could tell everybody wanted to come to work that morning. They were excited. I just thought, that’s what I want.
So my mom was horrified when I resigned my nice, safe job for less salary and no prospects in a room above Nando’s—do you have Nando’s in the States? It’s a chicken restaurant.
David (10:42): That’s usually not a sign of great success for a business if you’re above a chicken shop regardless of the name.
Martin (10:46): Well, I would say it’s not at the lowest end of the chicken shop market. So, you know, it’s just acceptable, the acceptable end. And it was just so exciting. We were a startup then. It was culturally a very different organization, but that sense that we really wanted to perform for our clients, not only because we’re good guys, but also if you do that, you could build a business off the back of that and you can diversify off the back of the trust that you create.
That thing remained totally constant, and we were 10 people back then, myself, my business partner. We’re still with the business 15 years later. We’re a couple a hundred people. We’re excited about what’s next. So it’s been a hell of a journey, but I would say it’s gone through phases. Each one of those phases has been different but fun. God, I’ve learned every single day of that 15 years.
David (11:41): So one of the things that I think is cool that you’ve done is you’ve written some columns online about mistakes that you’ve made, and in fact, you wrote a column recently that said, you have a quarter. You’re trying to achieve a certain number of mistakes a year. The point of the article I think was just to say, don’t be afraid of mistakes. Embrace them.
So I’d love to just hear about the philosophy and then I’d also just like to ask as you progress in this business, it’s been 15 years, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you’ve made along the way that you’ve found a way to solve?
Martin (12:07): So many, many mistakes. The thing about the mistakes, I gave that as a target to someone who worked for us. She didn’t know how good she was, and hopefully she knows it a bit more now. She’s progressed really brilliantly through the organization, but she was nervous. She was so worried about making a mistake that she wouldn’t make a decision. So I needed to break that behavior. And the honest truth is I’ve made more mistakes than anybody else in our business, and I always will because doing stuff, only two things can happen. It goes right or it goes wrong. When it goes wrong, you call that a mistake. But it all comes from doing and learning and iterating.
Honestly, I don’t think there’s any other way to build anything. That’s kind of the philosophy. Funny enough, I’ve just come across a book from an author whose other books have been really influential on me. A guy called Matthew Syed, an English journalist. And he wrote a book called Black Box Thinking, which is all about the incredible success story that is the aviation industry, which is all built on a cultural acceptance that mistakes are systematic and not personal, and that every mistake is a valuable learning opportunity. And it’s got a safety record eyeballs throwing out. Planes just don’t go wrong. It’s crazy.
David (13:21): Yeah, beyond Six Sigma in terms of success rates and planes.
Martin (13:25): Totally. And there’s a contrast in the book, which is definitely worth a read. And they talk about the medical industry where accidental fatalities and injury in the medical world, if you were to aggregate it all up, it’s the biggest killer or whatever. But it all comes from a culture of not wanting to admit to mistakes of expecting perfection. And of course, that can’t be true, especially if you’re trying new things. You could expect to fall over and graze your knee. As long as you get back up and do it better next time. That’s the point.
David (13:54): So can you give us an example of a mistake that’s particularly memorable for you that you overcame?
Martin (14:00): Well, talking to you makes me think of ventures into the States, and God, we made so many, so many separate ones, just in trying to expand into the US. We didn’t do enough research. We’d opened a few offices in Europe and said, well, we’ll just do that in the States. We’ll just land there. We’ve got some USDs. They’ll be interested. And that’s the first mistake is that very much characterizes American market. Everyone is interested. Everyone will take your call. Everyone will meet you because they just want to see if there’s something worth following up on. And because you guys are lovely, they’ll make you feel welcome and like you’re important. And they really care what you’re saying. None of that’s the truth.
I spent a lot of money learning that, and we set up things like TV buying operations and various things in the States, and all of them failed and all for a variety of different reasons. Like I said, we didn’t do our research. We put some of them in the wrong place. We hired the wrong people. Our oversight wasn’t right. We didn’t move someone from head office out there to do it. We didn’t have a client to launch with when we first launched. Even saying these things we’d get embarrassed because it’s so obvious, but it’s obvious because we’ve made those mistakes, and we’re still here to tell the tale.
And now we’ve got what we should have in the States, which is a nice, clear, differentiated proposition. We build from there, and as soon we got something that was genuinely exclusive and the market wanted, then we had something to build on. Until that point, we were just making mistake after mistake really.
So one of the first things I did after the MBO in 2018 was spend half my time in the States paying due difference to the world’s biggest market and actually going to learn rather than assuming that it would all be fine if we did what we normally did. So that’s a big one, but we’ve only got half an hour. I’ll give you more if you want. You name it, and I’ve done it.
David (15:48): I think every agency has made a mistake similar to that. I will say that we got some clients in China many years ago, and from one of the most significant VCs in Silicon Valley, just walked into these clients, said they’ll work with 3Q Digital. And we were working with this one client, and we were doing fantastic, just totally crushing it. And the client was always unhappy. They couldn’t figure out what was going on. And so eventually after six months of continual growth, they fired us. And we think—we’re not really sure—but we think they were supposed to be some sort of kickback going to the CEO from us that we totally, in our cultural ignorance, that just didn’t make any sense.
The other example I’d give is in the early days of digital marketing, the big holding companies said, we can do this Google stuff. Just hire one person, and then it will all work out. And that’s like you don’t know what you don’t know.
Martin (16:36): Yeah, it’s absolutely true. We got burnt in China as well. So yeah, we can compare Chinese Wall stories at some point. We had an office in Beijing and all that kind of stuff, but we don’t anymore. But your point about client happiness, just that tangential point there, I think that’s such an important one because it’s what my guys get sick of hearing me say is that as a service business, we’re in one business, which is client happiness. Because if you’re a legal firm and you win a case, an unhappy client will say, well, why didn’t you get me more? But if you lose the case, a happy client will say, okay, what did we learn? Where do we go from here?
Even when what you think is a verifiable results business, I still think client happiness, client trust, those are the things that define as a success or failure.
David (17:26): It’s a bit of a sad thing to say, but a great relationship and bad results is better than a bad relationship and great results. Again, as a performance marketer, you want to just be rewarded when you hit the numbers out of the park, and we’ve learned this the hard way as well. We used to not have any client service whatsoever. We were just spreadsheet junkies, and then you realize over time that people want to build rapport and they want to be listened to. Like you said, it’s about happy clients.
Martin (17:54): It totally is. One of the best things we’ve ever done, I got interested in the CES world at one point just moving around, talking to people. And I just got slightly fascinated by this concept of customer success, the idea obviously being that if you’ve got software in a business that’s just Round 1, you then got to get that business reliant on your software. Otherwise, they cancel you after the trial or whatever, which I just thought was really interesting.
Our product is people, primarily. So how do we take the essence of that, how do we turn it into something? We created this role which is called client success. So I have a really senior person and they were going to be building out this department, whose job is nothing, literally nothing, strictly nothing than to go to clients and say, what’s happening in your world? How are we doing?
And when we were setting up internally, people were quite resistant, they didn’t really get it. Everyone thought, oh, is this so’s role. In that case, we wanted to do this or that or the other. There was that what you’re checking up on this, all of this kind of stuff. We ironed all of that through. People got it straight away with clients, not one needed explaining twice. They were like, okay, I get it. Great. And opened up straight away. And our retention rate, our happiness rate with clients, everything has been through the roof ever since. Not a KPI insight, but it’s really just understanding that we’re all human beings. This is all relationships, and you’re there to make them better, happier, easier, work less hard, all that kind of stuff. It’s essentially what you’re there for.
David (19:22): So I’ll just go off on a tangent here and get your thoughts on this because I have this theory about COVID and agencies. Over the last two years, we’ve seen this incredible trend towards remote work, both not coming into the office and working with clients via Zoom, basically. And my theory is that is going to work okay for a while until agencies start to lose clients because they’re doing remote work and a competitive agency said, you know what, we’ll fly our team to Sri Lanka to meet with you, and even to the extent with offices.
As much as clients said they don’t care about a nice office and you can be above a chicken shack and we’re okay with that, at some point, clients do want to come in and see a vibrant office of people working together and a lot of energy. This is not my desire. My desire is that everyone who wants to work from home should be able to work from home, but I just wonder if the competitive nature of our business is going to end up with a lot more people in the office and a lot more people traveling to see clients. I would love to get your perspective on that.
Martin (20:22): Yeah, I’ve got space for 100 people with 15 people or whatever on any given day. A bit fairly early on in COVID, we just wanted people to know we trusted them because otherwise you get that presenteeism thing that was happening with people taking Zoom calls at 7:00 in the morning and 9:00 at night and not switching off and all that kind of stuff. Having established that trust, I wanted to keep it, which means that we let people make their own minds up about how they work, as long as they’re considering the clients, the business as well as their own personal situation. That’s all good.
But what is difficult to get then is exactly what you were talking about, that sense of everyone together, that buzz, that spark of each other. I think that clients want that, too. And ultimately, I think that’s the one that’s going to right itself most quickly because if clients start saying, you know what, I want to do this meeting in London on Tuesday, then you’re going to do that.
So that behavior is going to be a little bit self-righting, and I think that latent desire to be able to get together is there and part of our client community, something else that we try and do to address the human being behind the job title.
We have these CMO sessions where we’re able to get to really talk to each other, we’re there to facilitate and take to-dos and all of that kind of stuff, but it’s really about them talking to each other. We’ve been doing them virtually since COVID, maybe six people turning up.
We then said, we can do this lot face to face in London. We got 20 people turning up, and they got to be free that afternoon, be able to come to London, all that kind of thing. That, to me, speaks to this desire to get in a room with people and be that present with each other.
I totally agree with everything that you’re saying. I want to try and stay true to principles. I haven’t done this yet, so I don’t know if it's going to work. It might be another one of those failures, but I’d like to try and incentivize people to come back into the office in soft ways, gamify it a little bit, make it some fun. Every time we hit full team, then the pizzas are on us, whatever it is, because I think everything from just the feeling of being in a group to that serendipitous conversation to be able to grab three people and have an impromptu meeting, I think people will fall back in love with that.
I think it’s a matter of time before we get back to 80% of what we were before with hopefully a nice 20% of pressure release of people being able to work under their own direction. That’s a career entirely.
David (22:46): A little more room on the tube during the commute.
Martin (22:47): That’s still there, weirdly. That’s filled right up again, straightaway. That’s the one with the streets around San Francisco they’re looking like.
David (22:56): Getting work. Actually, downtown San Francisco is still pretty much a ghost town, but traffic wise in the suburbs, it’s starting to pick up. Like you said, it’s sort of weird because it’s like, in your case, the tube is filled but the offices are empty. In our case, downtown is empty but the streets are filled. I don't know where people are going, but somewhere.
Martin (23:14): Yeah, well, it’s the Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday thing, isn’t it? Everyone stays at home Monday and Friday, so.
David (23:20): You mentioned a lot about motivating your team. I want to hear a little bit about if you have core values or promises that you use with your team to create the right culture.
Martin (23:29): Absolutely. So values is easy. It was an easy question to answer rather than an easy thing to do. But we’ve had the same values for a long time now, and the acronym is PICK. We talk about passion, inquisitiveness, caring, and knowledge, which the point of knowledge is that you’re hungry to gain it, but you’re eager to share it. That’s been an incredible tool for us actually because in almost any situation, it’s a great reference point.
If we were on an interview and you’re thinking, I like this person, but I don’t know yet. And it’s like, okay, I haven’t been able to dive into the caring side of this person. That’s what I want to see next time to see if that’s there. It kind of works there.
Almost the worst thing about a thing or a person or whatever in their business is they’re not PICK. That’s reinforced top to bottom all of the time, and that’s amazing. That’s a real asset in our business. And in terms of trying to then turn that into actions and how we work, that’s a real live one for us at the moment.
I had COVID a little while ago and I was stuck in a room and got to researching culture a little bit because I could feel that since we changed our business model, and the idea of our group is it’s all interrelated.
So we don’t have two of anything. We have different things that can work together, which means we have to drive a really collaborative way of working. So that speaks to a kind of cultural change, and there’s, I don't know if you’ve have data on this, but there’s a Goffee and Jones model is it’s one of the key models in culture. It’s a full book, grade-like everything.
There’s another favor that COVID did me, is it gave me the time and space and frankly the boredom to get stuck into this. And we come from the bottom-right, which is called mercenary culture. So going back to being above the chicken restaurant and everyone in it for themselves, it was perform or go, it’s kind of addictive, and then when you go out, when you go to the pub together, you still kind of work and all this kind of stuff. That’s classic mercenary culture. None of these are wrong, by the way. They’re all just different.
And then we morphed into the top-left, which is high sociability, relatively low-go focus, I call it solidarity. And that’s called a networked model, which I thought was a really interesting word. Talk about network agencies, that’s exactly how they’re set up. And that’s a really good model when the group success equals the aggregate success of each individual person.
So actually it’s a low collaboration way of working, and if you’ve got media comp and wave maker, they’re both trying to pitch against each other, all this kind of stuff, everyone’s worried about their own peer now. And that’s fine because it makes each individual element stronger and therefore overall the group wins.
And where we’re trying to move to is the top-right, which is this called communal culture, which is really about creating a culture evolution so that we’re making it important for people to succeed through collaboration. We need different routines, different goals, different celebration rituals, all of that kind of stuff. All the rituals were natural to us where we’re all nice people that get along, but it’s about actually what can we build together. That’s the key question for us now.
So in terms of how we reward people, how we get people to act in a way that facilitates that is three key elements to that. One is emotional safety. We have to create emotional safety for each other, and me as much as anyone need to be reminded of that. Because that’s got to be the most important thing.
Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate. Every chance you get. In The Specialist Works (TSW), they’ve got a rule there that you’re not doing your job properly if you’ve only got people from TSW in your meetings. You have to have people from creative or data or one of the other businesses or whatever it might be. And that enriches the solution to clients.
The final one is ask what’s possible. We’re always halfway at the straight line growth. We’re always halfway. We’re never any further than that. It’s always where can we go next. So those are the kind of things now that we’re starting to really instill in people and they’re starting to respond to. But look, we only created the group nine months ago. It’s all happening now. We are here in the middle of that line.
David (27:48): You described it as, I think you said any stage that you’re in is a good stage. So you can be in the mercenary stage and that’s fine. There’s a book called Tribal Leadership, which talked about it as almost evolutionary where the first stage, which might be called mercenary, they called it something else. I think they described it as what it’s like to be in a prison where everyone is fighting for themselves, there’s no moral code, it’s just dog eat dog, and then you get to the fourth stage where there’s this sense of purpose beyond the individual and everyone is fighting for a greater cause than themselves. It sounds similar but different, I guess, based on what you’re talking about.
Martin (28:25): It totally is. The difference between this thing I’ve been basing it on and that sounds like it’s not an evolution necessarily. Actually you can be very successful, even have a very successful culture at whatever stage of evolution. So the classic communal culture is a startup where you’ve got a lot of people really enjoying working together. There’s insane goal focus because you’re in that mode. A lot of startups have that culture.
Honestly, I think you’ll find a lot of models that really work. The key thing is to have something that makes sense for you and then stop trying to change it, basically. Just get on and actually try and make it happen.
David (29:05): I’m going to ask you two more questions because we’re almost out of time. One is, I’m going to go back to some of your columns that I really liked. You talked about one instance where you had to fire a friend and another instance where you fired your personal assistant in one day. I want to just say people think firing sometimes equals mean or bad culture, but I actually feel like firing is an indicative of a mistake that we’ve made probably in hiring, is also the best way to preserve a great culture, and that people and the team end up respecting leaders for making tough decisions like that. I’d just love to hear your perspective on that.
Martin (29:37): That’s a really big topic. What do you want first? Do you want to hear about why I had to let my first PA go after a day?
David (29:44): Yeah, let’s hear that.
Martin (29:45): So it’s a classic hiring error, which I knew about, but I still made it. I was hiring the first PA in our business. This was at a time when the founder was still in the business. So he didn’t have a PA. Front of mind for me, it was so important, and this wasn’t perceived as a vanity hire. This person was not working for me. They were bringing value to the business and all this kind of stuff. I was so pre-occupied with that.
I found this candidate that was super qualified, had all of these different skills, had a professional qualification in minuting meetings, this whole list of things that they could do. And I got so pre-occupied with that I forgot to actually look at the person until the day that they started. It happened to be the day we were moving into our brand new office. And I literally turned the corner and said we’re all meeting before we walk round the corner to the big reveal of the new home.
As I approached, I just saw them and I thought, I could never get on with you. And it’s totally not your fault. It’s 100% my fault. I must have hired 100 people by then or whatever it was, and I still managed to make that mistake.
David (30:56): It was just like a vibe, something that you just could see that our personalities weren’t connected?
Martin (31:01): It was totally that. It was exactly that. This was, I’m sure, a very lovely person, but what should have been the first thing I looked for in someone who is going be basically my constant companion was how are we going to get on with each other. Had I actually forgotten to do that thing, I would have screamed that person out in the very start of it rather than—luckily they were temping before they did that. They didn’t leave a job to join that one. We made sure they were remunerated for the inconvenience and it was all good.
That willingness to be able to take that tough decision, and that particular one was tough for various different reasons. The least I had to do the email of shame to the entire business, introduce them to everyone, but sometimes when someone’s worked with you for a long while or whatever it might be, you still have to recognize that this isn’t necessarily forever. Businesses go through phases. We were just talking about that. Sometimes different phases, people don’t enjoy or translate to the phase that you’re going to next. Sometimes people are coached really well, whatever it is, but the honest truth is I think if you’re thinking it, they’re probably thinking it, too, and so will other people be as well.
Actually the cost of not doing it, which I’ve done before. Like I said, made all the mistakes. I’d make them all them again, but I’ve not made that decision and it’s just got worse. And you end up with an unhappy person making the people around them unhappy. You think the clients are fine. The clients aren’t fine, all that kind of thing.
David (32:30): I’m shaking my head vigorously for people who can’t see me shaking my head vigorously.
Martin (32:36): So I think not shying away from the decision is super important, but I think there’s art to how you do it, and every situation is different. Every person is different, but if you can get to a point at the end of it where everyone feels like it is a positive outcome and they can walk away from it with their pride intact and with an eye to the future and to be positive about what comes next, I honestly think that’s 99% of the time achievable if you set yourself out today. Sometimes it’s a tad more expensive, but in the long run, that’s not the end of the world either.
David (33:09): I think a phrase that has never been uttered in any company ever is I fired that person too soon.
Martin (33:17): Yes. Absolutely. It’s totally right. And half the time when you shy away from the decision, they end up leaving anyway, and you just lost control of that situation rather than being able to proactively manage it.
David (33:31): And as you said, we’re a people business. We’re a human capital business, and so every person on the team is either going to add to the capital of the business or detract from it. And I had a guy in my team who was a soccer player, semi-professional soccer player, and he was managing a bunch of people. And he came to me once and said, I think it’s okay to have B players in the organization. And I said, well, let me ask you this. If you’re on a side of 11 people in soccer and three are Bs and eight are As, what happens? And he said, well, the A players have to play the B players’ positions. And I said, so would you say it would be better if the B players weren’t even there?
As hard as that is, it’s like it’s better to have eight people spread out than to have eight people worried about what the three people who aren’t talented are doing. And he got the point.
Martin (34:12): Totally. There’s circumstances when I think the same is true for clients as well. One of the things I’ve done right from time to time is actually taken those calls on clients. And years ago, at a different scale of business, resigned our biggest client. And before that, we resigned a whole bunch of clients at a time when we were maybe doing, I don't know, £8 million gross profit. We resigned about a million pounds worth of gross profit. But it was all for the right reasons, and we were in control of that situation again.
What it meant was that we could consult with teams. We could work out where we had that intersection of clients who were relatively unprofitable, net profitable. So in other words, you’re working too hard for not enough money, but it always tended to be the clients that were the squeaky wheels that people really didn’t enjoy working on.
So we put people in charge of those selection decisions, but because we were in control of it, we could say, okay, you’re going to get some time back from all these time vampires that we’re going to get rid of. What are you going to do with it? Who are you going to grow? Actually, we’ve come out of those processes with growth. And every time, we’ve done it as well.
So you have to make sure you’ve got the right mix both running your people. Totally agree. I love your soccer analogy. And sometimes you’ve got to do a bit of gardening on the client mix as well.
David (35:32): Absolutely. We could have a whole podcast on some of the times where I waited too long to fire a client that was either a jerk or was just not a good cultural fit. In every instance, the collateral damage is great people at the agency who end up leaving because they either are miserable because the client’s making them miserable or they lose trust in the management that they’re not living the cultural values. In your case, that’d be the caring value.
Last question, I thought we’d close with a little bit of rock and roll, is there any band right now that you’re listening to that you think everyone should be listening that maybe isn’t?
Martin (36:05): Oh, wow, always. I’m a real collector of new bands. I for one, I think you like them. I just saw in London here, they’re a US band, but they were touring for the time. I’m sure you know, who can not only rock with the best of them but they’ve also got one of the very best songwriters out there. He creates worlds in his songs, in his albums. Everyone who doesn’t know The Hold Steady should go out and seek them out. You’ll catch the bug.
David (36:35): All right. We’re putting that in the notes to the podcast. So everyone check the notes out and get on your Spotify and check out The Hold Steady. Martin, this is great. Thank you so much. Really appreciate. Congrats on the success. And next time you’re in the United States planning additional conquest, I hope we get together.
Martin (36:50): I will definitely look forward to that. Great to talk to you.
David (36:53): Awesome.
A new episode of Agentic Shift drops every Wednesday. Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or visit agenticshift.com to see the latest episode.
Links
Black Box Thinking, a book by Matthew Syed