Logan Lyles (00:07.711)
Project management is always a fun topic in agency land. How do you keep things on time, on budget and on scope? And how do you keep clients happy all at all at the same time? Welcome back to the agency builders podcast. I'm Logan Lyles. I'm joined today by two of our co-hosts in the community, Tyler Paget and Jay Owen. Cassie Shay is with us in spirit. Tyler, Jay, how you guys doing today?

Jay Owen (00:29.911)
Hello, doing great. Can't complain.

Tyler Pigott (00:31.878)
Doing great. Yeah, I'm excited to be here.

Logan Lyles (00:35.048)
Awesome. Well, for regular listeners of the show know that we've started these kind of roundtable conversations regularly on the podcast. In addition to our guest interviews with great agency owners and community members, we're normally covering three different segments, agency advice, digging into the data and community conversations. We're going to skip the agency advice one because we've got enough advice for this week. We're going to dig into the data because it ties into this.

topic of project management where there was a great conversation on Slack this week in the agency builders community. To kick it off, I have pulled up here a page from the new state of agency operations report, the second edition from teamwork.com, my old stomping grounds. And I thought that this data point was interesting to kick things off as we talk about project and client management. You guys, it said that only 32 % of agencies

are hitting a benchmark accuracy range when it comes to scoping their projects. Actually, 68 % of agencies are struggling with the accuracy of their scopes of work. When that comes to mind, what does that start getting you guys thinking about Tyler J? Tyler, maybe let's kick it off with you. Jay led off last time, so we'll go to you,

Tyler Pigott (01:53.182)
man, when I think about 68 % of agencies struggling with that, it makes my heart hurt a little bit. Just because I know that that's a lot of people that are losing money. I also would say I have conversations with agencies all the time and I totally believe that number. Many people don't dig into the data. They don't track their time. It doesn't have to be a time track from a, my gosh, you're babysitting a time tracker every moment of every day for every staff member.

It's more just estimations of how long something might take you, right? And I think that those are incredibly overlooked in general as agencies. And many people kind of just look out there and go, well, I, you know, whatever, I estimated this much and I didn't spend much more. For those of you that are listening, I'm using my hands, the threshold, a little bit of how close you might get to a ceiling, right? And reality is, is most of the time it doesn't leave you a whole lot of headroom. So that's kind of like first glance at those is like, man, that.

totally resonates with what conversations I've had as well as what I've lived through.

Jay Owen (02:56.804)
Yes, a little PTSD for me. I mean, I've been doing this for almost 30 years at this point, which is crazy. And I can't tell you how many projects I have scoped and ended up costing me way more than we made on them. And thankfully, we don't do that anymore, mainly because I'm not the one scoping it anymore because I'm very bad at it. So that is one of the answers. It actually is usually a pretty good answer. The founders tend to not be very good scopers.

Logan Lyles (02:57.003)
Yeah, Jay.

Logan Lyles (03:16.399)
That's the answer. Just have the founder no longer scope projects,

Tyler Pigott (03:23.678)
It's not about true.

Jay Owen (03:26.296)
because we're not typically, not always, but typically not very good detail people. A couple things helped with this though for us is we switched to a paid discovery upfront. We don't call it a paid discovery, we call it a blueprint, but that changed a lot with regards to building the right things. We also, I think, glamorized the idea of everything being totally custom all the time as some kind of boutique special agency.

And when I realized we weren't that special and there's a lot of people who do really awesome work all over the place, we started to productize a lot more. And so by productizing, you're really able to narrow in your scope because you've already done the thing that you're doing and you have a particular, you know how much it's going to cost you. And so maybe that's in hours, maybe it's in dollars. At the end of the day, it's all about dollars. so having a paid discovery upfront where we decide what products to sell people.

and then having a productized stack helps solve that a lot. But yeah, I feel the pain because I made those mistakes for many years. I one of the first development projects I sold. I think at the time I sold it for like $20,000. It was one of the bigger projects I'd ever sold. And I was thinking, I mean, I am doing it, you know? And it turned out that project cost me $25,000. So it wasn't good. It wasn't good.

Tyler Pigott (04:46.457)
no! But then you feel like when you land those projects you have so much space though. Like you're like, I've got so much room for, I can do whatever I want. And then all of a sudden you're like, it's gone.

Logan Lyles (04:51.492)
I like what you said.

Jay Owen (04:54.913)
Yeah, you think you do.

Jay Owen (04:59.116)
I've learned over time that no matter what you quoted, if you're not disciplined in your operations, you can spend any amount of money. That also turns out to be true every time I go to Costco. So, you know.

Tyler Pigott (05:11.424)
We're getting personal. We're getting personal on this podcast.

Logan Lyles (05:11.472)
building clients.

Jay Owen (05:12.594)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Logan Lyles (05:14.908)
building scopes of work is just like, you know, filling up the grocery cart at Costco. There's always. I love it. I love your point there, Jay, just to call that out for listeners about our shift in, offering a paid discovery, but not using that language when we talk with, with clients about it, right? I was just on a sales call earlier this week talking about.

Jay Owen (05:18.916)
Yeah, you go in for a rotisserie chicken and you come out $300 later and it's like, what happened?

Logan Lyles (05:41.562)
our marketing blueprint process, what that consultation is, what it delivers to the client, what it costs. And even without using that terminology of paid discovery, I had some pushback of, well, we've never had to pay to get a proposal from an agency before, right? And so they were kind of thinking along those lines. So one, don't kind of give more ammo to that side by calling it a paid discovery. The way that we really frame it is, you know, we could jump into,

produce and promote the latter two stages of what we do in everything in marketing at business builders. But if we skip the planning phase, then we could build the wrong thing to use your words from earlier, Jay. So I think that's really applicable for a lot of other agencies. If we kind of transition into our community conversations segment that we're doing on these episodes as well, there was a question in the community a little bit further down the line from scoping to keeping clients up to date.

when you have ongoing work going, whether that's a project or a retainer. Jay, do you want to give some context into where that conversation started on Slack this week?

Jay Owen (06:48.248)
Yeah, I think that a lot of people struggle trying to figure out what that pricing is going to look like and what that structure will look like for recurring revenue versus project revenue. And I'm just looking back at the actual Slack post that was shared. if you're listening and you're not in the agency builders Slack channel, you probably want to do that because a lot of folks in here asking really good questions about projects. But what I find a lot of times is people get stuck

with how a lot of it goes back to the productization thing that I was talking about. It's like, how do you know what to charge somebody? And a lot of times the answer is because you've already charged them for it. what people often will do is they'll want to go ask somebody else what they charge for it. And that might give you like a general metric to go, what is somebody else charging? But you have no idea what their expenses are.

So just getting a feel for what somebody else is charging in revenue is irrelevant if your expense structure is not the same. If you've got a huge staff of full-time employees and somebody else has got a whole bunch of contractors, they're paying on a project-by-project basis, you're not comparing apples to apples. And so a lot of that happens in pricing methodology and figuring out how to manage those projects that come out of that because they just ask somebody out what they charge and charge the same amount without asking better questions to start.

Logan Lyles (08:11.571)
Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. Shout out to the slack community. As Jay mentioned, go to agency builders dot com slash join. If you're not a member of the community yet, we've got a growing slack community and more resources dropping on the circle side of the community as well. And one of those questions was from one of our members this week, you guys that was talking specifically about, you know, how do you

structure subtasks, what do you give clients access to if you're inviting them into your project management system? How do you keep them up to date on timelines, those sorts of things? Jay, you had a pause clause idea I want to come back to on this, but Tyler, curious your thoughts when you kind of read that question, getting beyond scoping and more about keeping clients up to date on the work and the projects. What were some of the things that came to mind as you looked at that question in the community this week?

Tyler Pigott (09:02.287)
Yeah. I think it almost like it piggybacks to kind what we were talking about earlier, know, rewinding into some of those kind of like project management and how do you scope things and how do you not go above and beyond and all that kind of stuff. And I would say for me, I always, when someone asks a question like that, I go, well, I have no idea how to answer that question because of the fact that I don't know what your process is. Like, I don't know, have you detailed out all the different actions you take when you deliver XYZ product?

And that's one of the things that we were kind of probably over the top when it comes to nerding out on our numbers, you know, and just making sure we had master lists of literally everything that went in from external meetings to internal meetings, to amount of people, to research, to everything all the way down to amounts of revisions and everything. And I think what... Correct. Yeah, correct. Yeah, yeah, correct. Yeah, as far as just kind of how we listed out everything that was part of a certain deliverable.

Logan Lyles (09:45.983)
In the way that you guys tax task things out at learn for creative, mean in your agency. Okay. Okay. Gotcha.

Logan Lyles (09:57.151)
Okay.

Tyler Pigott (09:57.35)
Whether that was a website, whether that was content, whether that was sales funnels, whatever it was. We also did the kind of paid for discovery, you know, type projects or pay for strategy kind of projects. But I think one of the things going back to the original question of how do you keep essentially, how do you just keep clients moving forward was, know, essentially like if you don't, I think one of the things I hear a lot from clients or from our clients, meaning agencies in this kind of case.

Logan Lyles (10:01.663)
Okay.

Tyler Pigott (10:23.849)
is that they don't necessarily have a process for getting people, like moving people along the creative journey, if you will, in the midst of delivery, whether that's performance marketing or branding. And so I bring it back to that initial, how do you mapping everything out tactically? Because oftentimes, well, how many revisions did you sell in this fixed bid project? They don't know. They didn't even say that. They just literally said, we just want the client to be happy.

And then you go, well, that's going to, you will lose money on this project. And if you don't, you are a miracle kind of thing. and so I think there's lots of different ways to do that. I'll just to come off the top of my head that were kind of like cheat codes, I suppose. One was we instigated or instituted, you will, the like, hard deadlines. So essentially we ran our, our production teams in sprints and there was sprints every week. We just did sprints every week.

So essentially we had like an anchor point that an account manager could go out and get feedback by. So most of the time it was if you don't have your feedback in by Tuesday morning, we're not touching your project till the next week because we can't actually plan it out. And so it kind of gave the account manager something to work with versus, whenever you have a chance to give us feedback on this project or approval, thank you. And that could be six months from today or it could be an hour from today kind of thing. Totally.

Logan Lyles (11:44.194)
Yeah, it's completely unclear to the client and therefore you don't have anything to kind of hold their feet to the fire or let them know what the consequences are if they take two weeks versus two days to respond, right?

Tyler Pigott (11:55.198)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that's helpful just to kind of have like these hard deadlines. You can make those up as an agency. It's okay. But you have to all have an agreement when the company and how production works and how you're going to actually finish projects. I'd say the other thing too that we played around with a lot in different kind of fashions or seasons of the business was how do you build a culture that's incentivizing to hit like margins?

And so for instance, if you build in a project and there is two rounds revisions in that project or three rounds revisions in that project, and I'm talking traditional deliverables here from an agency standpoint, if you hit the first one, shouldn't you maybe bonus people that helped you hit that? And if that becomes a, like, like a almost gamification of a, as a designer or as a content producer, as a salesperson or whatever, if I can hit one, like I get it right the first time.

then I get a little bit of a bump or there's something there. Like that's a really cool way to start building culture around on it as an internal team, because then everybody's trying to figure out effective efficiencies and effectiveness within the project. So I think it all of the way goes down, one is process and then the other is how do you kind of, I'll use the word incentivize to get people all moving in the same direction. So I don't know if those make sense, but that's kind of two that come off out my head.

Logan Lyles (13:13.83)
make perfect sense to me. It's about clarity in your communication about timelines to clients, which you got to get on the same page first. And then the gamification with the incentive incentives that you could structure into hitting those, those timelines or exceeding them. Right. Jay, I wanted to come back to something we alluded to earlier before we hit record, you were talking about this concept of a pause clause, that you've talked about with other agency owners when it comes to keeping clients.

on track. What is that and when would you use it and how would you use it?

Jay Owen (13:45.572)
Yes, so a common problem that a lot of agencies experience is this where a client just kind of doesn't reply. I know anybody has experienced this that's listening, but you sometimes what will happen is they will wait four weeks to send you content or a response and then when you get the response the next day they want to know why it's not done yet. I don't know if that's, maybe that's just me, but pretty common. A lot of people...

Tyler Pigott (14:04.981)
And I feel like there's a lot of people just in the backseat of the church waving right now, like that's just saying amen. I feel like at least that's what's happening.

Jay Owen (14:08.548)
That's right. That's right. That's right. So I got this idea from Carl Smith back in the day and he had this contract clause called the Paul's Clause and it basically says some version of and I should probably pull this out and I can maybe even share it in the agency builders community with folks with the asterisks that I'm not an attorney but you should consult your lawyer. But basically it says if a client doesn't reply

Logan Lyles (14:09.818)
Hahaha

Jay Owen (14:38.616)
with X amount of days or X amount of weeks, whatever the goal is to get them to reply by, the agency has the right, or maybe even automatically after a certain period of time, puts the project on pause. Let's say we're a website, for example, and the client hasn't replied in three or four weeks. Well, for us, and a lot of other small agencies out there, you're typically doing X amount per week. For us, we're usually starting a new website every week, launching a new website every week. Well, what happens is if we don't...

stay in that cadence and we're not keeping things moving. It's kind of like waiting tables. And Frimbat's ever waited tables before. It's a great job for a project manager because you're basically a project manager when you're waiter. And you get one table in, they're not ready to order yet. Then the second table comes in, they're not ready to order yet either. Now the third table comes in and they're ready to order. Now you got three tables, but the third one ordered first. And now the first one's aggravated that their order came in later, even though they were here.

you know, even if they didn't place their order yet, right? And so project management is the same. Also, project managers are dealing with a kitchen, not an actual kitchen, but they're dealing with designers and developers and writers and all other kind of things to actually get the work done. And often when things go wrong, it's not their fault inherently, sometimes it is, but it's not inherently. Sometimes it's the back kitchen that's causing the problem, right? And so they got to learn to deal with that. And so this pause clause, what it says basically is, hey, if you take X amount of time, we can pause your project. And if we pause your project,

We might not be able to restart it as soon as you reply to us. There might be a period where we have to kind of reinitiate you back into the system, which helps automate the process of everything else.

Logan Lyles (16:16.317)
Yeah. And what are some of the other elements that you could consider putting into that clause? Again, not complete legal advice, but maybe there's a restart fee or something like that as well. It's about timing and then maybe some cost involved basically. you kind of keep people from, you know, entering that zone of like, you're putting the road sign there of like, you don't want to cross here because here's the danger, right?

Jay Owen (16:29.442)
You could.

Jay Owen (16:39.138)
Yeah, and we would remind a client to, and you definitely could put monetary things. I think we've maybe done that in the past. We've not had to use it in a very long time, so it's not really been a problem, but we have historically. And you could put a monetary value to restart because it costs, it does cost you money. Because if you're waiting on somebody else and you're not filling that gap with a new client because you're waiting on this other client, you got to keep enough bandwidth to provide good service. You know, there can be all kinds of complexities from a workflow perspective. And ultimately what you're trying to do is not ever have to use the Paul's Clause.

You want to mention it up front so that they're motivated. So just like there can be positive rewards, like Tyler was talking about, to incentivize the team to execute on certain things, having consequences for the client for not doing their part as well. And then having good, friendly follow-ups along the way, like, hey, we really don't want to put your project on pause. I know the timing's really important to you. But if you remember when we first started, one of the things that we talk about is if we don't get a response after X amount of time.

then we do put the project on pause so we can make sure we're serving everybody at a really high level. And then that usually generates a reply from the client.

Logan Lyles (17:43.07)
I remember, go ahead, Tyler.

Tyler Pigott (17:43.186)
I like I was just going to say, I feel like I've read a contract from an agency recently that I was like, that's a great idea. And it was this pause clause, but it was, you had to initial in the contract next to, I'm going to do my part, whatever that looks like for that agency. But it was like a call out specifically of like, Hey, you're engaging with us. That means you're going to show up for calls and give approval, you know, all the different aspects that you're hoping for, which just kind of like manages the expectation of it. And I really liked that idea. I that was cool.

Jay Owen (17:56.131)
Mm.

Logan Lyles (18:12.45)
That's a really good call out Tyler because the last thing we want to do is even if you consult a lawyer and you get the right legal language to add this to your agreements based on Jay and Tyler's recommendations here, don't think that just putting that in your agreement and being able to point back to and say, Hey, here's this thing we never talked about, but it's in your five page T's and C's that's going to do you nothing. And that's not going to win you any favorability with that client. Right guys.

Jay Owen (18:28.651)
Right.

Tyler Pigott (18:29.861)
Yeah, it's true.

Jay Owen (18:37.922)
Yeah, I always say if you've got to point back to the contract, things are probably not going well. And contracts are only as good as the people that signed them. Contracts are only as good as the people that signed them. I know you can take them to court, can... Nobody wants to deal with any of that on either side. And so it's always better to just over communicate all this stuff up front because the curse of knowledge is real. We think, we talked about it, we mentioned it, but did you like... and did you really get them to sign off on the agreement? That's one of reasons...

Tyler Pigott (18:38.405)
Yeah. Yeah.

Tyler Pigott (18:43.057)
It's so true.

Jay Owen (19:07.263)
At our agency at Business Builders, we call it a marketing partnership because we see us as a partner with the company to help them win. It takes two to tango and we need to both be kind of moving in the same direction. Otherwise, it's not going to work.

Logan Lyles (19:23.587)
Yeah. One last thing before I let you guys go today, I wanted to ask about kind of keeping clients projects on track. We've talked about scoping up front. We've talked about communicating throughout the project, especially when they ghost us, when they go dark. I know there are people who are not in the log to us. One of the things I've run into in running an account management team is kind of getting the pushback of, well, I understand you guys have a system, you have a normal cadence, you know, things can get backed up.

But we have this contractor over here that if I just sent it to them, they'd be back to us in two hours, right? And sometimes the perception of value of an agency can kind of be undermined when you have those sorts of conversations. How would you guys kind of combat that pushback and continue to make it not so much about your system, but about the value to the client at the end of the day? You know, it's kind of a tightrope to walk.

Tyler, you're kind of smiling there. Imagine you've had a conversation or two like this one, man.

Tyler Pigott (20:19.605)
I mean right now my first reaction is just snarky. I'm like great. Good luck with the freelancer. You know, like that's what I want to say obviously that don't I don't recommend that but I mean, I think one of the things that we put into practice was really trying hard to manage expectations early So it's not a like recovery clients late I need this to you know, I needed just to hit hit my job performance, whatever account manager

Logan Lyles (20:31.177)
Ha ha.

Tyler Pigott (20:47.729)
But it's more of a in this meeting at the beginning of the month. How do I go? This is what's coming down the pipe. Can you guys make sure you allow time for this, this and this next week, the week after about the end of the month? So you're kind of just like you're not trying to ever like pull it. You're really trying to like say in advance, if that makes sense. So that's one of the recommendations as far as like that conversation as far as, you know, in the midst of it, right? You're waiting for them to probably pass their deadline.

And they're coming back to you with like, well, this guy over here could do it this way. I mean, I think you just have to navigate that from a just value standpoint. And probably they're just saying that to, they're not going to actually bail. They're probably just saying that to kind of like throw that out there and see if you'll come, you know, come in their direction and turn into that yes, man or yes, woman type mentality. So I do think that there is that element of like, you have to kind of like stand your ground and have reasoning for your, for standing your ground.

so yeah, that's just how I probably handle it. But the snarky in me wants to come out first and just say, good luck, you know.

Logan Lyles (21:51.109)
Good luck, two-word answer. Jay, what would you add to that?

Tyler Pigott (21:54.825)
Ha ha ha.

Jay Owen (21:55.652)
I mean, again, if we're having this conversation, it's kind of like pointing back to the contract, it's probably not going really well. One of the things I talk about a lot is, and you mentioned this, expectations. And I always say misplaced expectations are the greatest cause of any relational strife. I don't care if it's me and my wife, me and my kids, me and friends, clients, team members, you name it. I expect this, and they expect that, and those things are too far apart, and guess what? We have a problem.

And so I always say communication is the bridge that connects expectations. And so if we're not communicating clearly and often, and we get to this point where they're like, well, the contractor will do X, Y, or the accident to X, Y, and Z, my attitude is kind of like Tyler's. It's like, yeah, but you don't know if that contractor is going to be there tomorrow, you know, because I've dealt with plenty of them. And there are a lot of awesome ones. We have a lot of awesome contractors we work with in all kind of different categories, for sure. But the reality is they're one person. And there is an advantage to working with a company.

which is if my web designer quits tomorrow, I still have a contract to finish a website for you and I'm going to get it done. You don't have to go find a new person. And also as much as some contractors can be really available, one of the downsides of working with a freelancer or contractor in general, and agency owners and leaders know this as they build their teams out, is one of the disadvantages of dealing with the individual is, well, they could just go get a new job tomorrow and they decide they're not a freelancer anymore. Well, now all of a sudden the person that you send all your stuff to is gone. Do you have a backup on your bench?

Tyler Pigott (23:18.199)
Yeah.

Jay Owen (23:21.88)
You know, same thing is true of clients trying to do it, but I think of it more in the context of being an agency owner. If you're just doing these individual contractors, you can create some problems. And I say that as somebody who works with hundreds of contractors all over the world.

Logan Lyles (23:29.361)
Yeah.

Logan Lyles (23:34.501)
Yep. Yeah. think that's go ahead, Tyler.

Tyler Pigott (23:35.597)
I'd say the only like piece to that would be, one of things that I would encourage people to do is to start kind of educating, training, teaching, coaching their account managers and team to really like early on, I think what's so, what happens so often is clients like want to dig their heels in and it starts to be like a them and versus us. And reality is, that as a part, like I love what Jay said about partners because, hey, we're on the same team.

Are we trying to get to the same result here? We're trying to help you if you'll let us. And so sometimes if you are in the middle of those right now, like somebody listened to it, you kind of have to have that DTR, to use an old church term, but determine your relationship a little bit of just like, Mr. Prospect, Mrs. Prospect, we're on the same team. Let's figure this out versus it being a them against us or us against them kind of concept.

I think that that's coachable, that's trainable, that's doable within kind of culture, but sometimes you do have to have those conversations, a little bit of reminding them that, we're trying to get to the same place here.

Logan Lyles (24:41.918)
Man, DTR. It's been a while since I've heard that acronym to find the relationship, man. we're, we're talking about misplaced mic drop. If you could drop the mic today, you would be allowed to do it, Tyler. that is awesome. Well, thank you guys both for another great conversation. I've been enjoying these. If you're listening to this, make sure that you're subscribed either in your favorite podcast.

Tyler Pigott (24:44.569)
I know, that pulled that out. I feel good about that. That was the reason I'm here today. Thanks for having me, I'll see you all.

Jay Owen (24:44.823)
Ha

Logan Lyles (25:07.465)
Player or on YouTube if you're not a member of the agency builders podcast go to agency builders comm slash Join or hit me up on LinkedIn if you have some questions about the community We have been seeing a lot of growth a lot of engagement. We're doing more Events both virtual and obviously our in-person event coming up at the agency builders retreat here in March so

get plugged in, reach out to myself, Tyler, Jay and Cassie. She's not here, but she's here in spirit. Another great one of our hosts here in the community. Jay Tyler, thanks for hopping on the mic again today,

Jay Owen (25:42.211)
Thanks for logging

Tyler Pigott (25:42.786)
Absolutely. See ya.