Author: wilreynolds

7 years ago I wrote this post about how developing bad bonus programs, made me almost wanna quit. I wrote up exactly how I felt and how soul crushing that time was in detail, so now let me share more of what we’re doing now, and hopefully that will help you avoid that kind of heartache.

18 months ago I talked about when life changing money isn’t, and have been in a deep reflection ever since, so expect more posts like this one.

Couple of high level learnings here on our new approach to bonuses this time:

Fuck “Fairness” — someone is always going to have an issue, get some thick skin on that. One thing I realized is instead of trying to be “fair” I reminded the team that I own this company and could choose to keep the money, but that isn’t who I want to be now that we are in the 4th phase of my growth (see below).
But Limit Your Bias — Try to limit your bias, try to make a chunk something calculated vs done with your gut. To be honest I just don’t know all the wonderful things people do here. So create a pool for managers below you who are closer to their teams day to day.
Ewww, they are getting how much? — Be OK with the fact that some people are going to get a bit more than you wish they did, but you gotta stick to something that scales, or you start getting called out for favoritism.

Now here we are, bonus time.

I love to see us grow, so what do you do when you love to see your company grow, you still wake up stoked to go to work, but money / financial survival no longer becomes the motivation? Me, I start aggressively bonusing. That was my answer.

Which leads me to our bonus plan for 2018. Thank you to Joel Gascoigne, who gave me the courage to do this publicly.

In 2018 I invested $756,494 in profits and bonuses or ~19% of our Net Income back into the people. (There’s a gap between what I made available & what was deployed because people don’t take advantage of all our perks)

Charity @ $130,473 was also invested in our communities. Our offices are in places where we can’t deny that people out there need help, we are doing our part to not only invest our time, but also our $$ to help improve the communities we inhabit.

This bonus breakdown looks like this:

Kaizen budgets ~$215k, Note: This might not be considered by all a true bonus as some people might use it for a conference but others use their s for gym memberships and Pelotons, and I didn't have the time to separate it all out. (we take the tax burden of this which lets team members get the full benefit).

Vacation bonus ~$110k we made people use them, or book by end of year. Halfway through the year I was like we’re killing it, and the team is working their ass off, lets show them that we want them to take that unlimited vacation.

Student Loans ~$45k they suck, so I tripled the amount paid last year.

Manager Bonus Pool ~$250k (Originally was supposed to be 100k)

New Team Bonus Pool ~$250k (originally was only Kaizen Budget)

I think as any company you go through phases, and Seer is at a phase where I want to be a part of helping to put as many people who are supporting our culture and growth at Seer in the best position I can.

How do we keep this from being an expectation?

First this year I surprised most people with this, so we are not making this a definite next year, other than to say to the team, we’re in that 4th Phase and I’m going to ensure we provide between 10–20% of our profit as long as we’re in Phase 4 (see below).

I expect that in future years we may need to keep more to invest in innovation or grow the nest egg, but as long as we’re profitable and knowing that I don’t need the profit of the company I think we can reasonably bank on us investing $$ back to the people in this company in an aggressive manner.

I hope we eventually are at 6,8,10 million in profit someday because as long as I believe that the first 2–3 million in profit goes to the company for innovation and nest egg, I’m only going to have more and more to invest to the team and that makes me happy gives me purpose.

How did we communicate this to the team?

Here are some snippets to help articulate how we messaged and calculated our bonuses in a transparent way so the team know.

Here is the message & breakdown people got:

Then we wanted to share with the team how we calculated the bonus with some sights and sounds:

I intentionally try to remove my bias, so I like that 6% is purely driven by #s, and the 8% that is connected to our efforts to lead in big data, I am a decent proxy for that.

I recognize that while *I* am pushing us to big data and I chose to overweight that this year that my directors have their own goals and they have more visibility into their teams, so they were given the ability to bonus their teams, as I provided each director an amount they could invest.

Here is one from my dir of BD:

Bonuses create politics & politics divide teams

I’ve gotten stung by this BAD a couple times. So this time around I learned, surprise people. Let them know where your heart is, show them that you honestly want to share profits but I didn’t make the %’s and the levers known & I plan on changing them every 6–12 months.

Overall we say to people just do the things that we say are important, and we’ll be pulling those levers, so keep shouting out your co-workers, keep volunteering, keep growing your clients, keep finding ways to bring big data to our team, keep blogging, recruiting, etc. Every year based on what we value I’ll be picking 2–4 things that truly make me proud of this place and make me want to keep working here, and I’ll be seeking ways to invest our profits in our people as aggressively as I can who support those things.

I want to thank my exec team, especially Steve and Crystal whom I dropped all this on last minute after seeing our profit for the year, thank you so much!

And of course Joel Gascoigne and the Buffer team, you continue to inspire me and coach me (with your posts and occasionally answering my DMs) and the Seer team on how you are doing things, you offer blueprints we all can use and you keep showing us there’s a better way, thank you!

Extra note I moved to the bottom:

How did I get to this point?

The 4 Financial Phases of Running This Business

Phase 1 — Survive, I was getting underpaid, those first few years I started Seer I was getting paid WAY under market. I wasn’t not giving healthcare to my co-workers and they too are underpaid in the market, but somehow they decided to join the ride.

Phase 2 — Thrive, I’m finally paying myself market rates and my team is finally getting paid decent, healthcare is better and even covers families. We’ve been around for 5 years and oh snap, we didn’t go under! I’m starting to build a nest egg in this phase, to help make sure we can weather rainy days in the company.

Phase 3 — I’m Good Phase, this is the phase where there’s a nest egg for the owner(s) personally. This phase my stress is reduced b/c I’ve reached an “enough” point, where I have enough and don’t need to work to sustain my lifestyle. Employees don’t typically care about this, but when you are finding a way to dole out the Co’s profits at an aggressive pace, it now means we’ve hit a phase where I am working to help put others in an “I’m Good” Phase too. It’s not good enough for me to be in a good financial position I want to try to help others in my company get there too.

Phase 4 — Aggressively Start to Share the Wealth. In this phase I’m basically saying look I want to grow this business, but I am going to take less and less of the profit. I want to continue to grow our company nest egg so we can lose out largest client and be OK. I want to keep some for innovation, but after that lets create mechanisms to deploy it.

I hope by investing our profits in our people aggressively, I hope to help put a dent in the stressors of life for our people, student loans, mortgages, and college funds for those kids we keep on having 🙂

I am a big believer that when I was running the business I founded, that I was a liability to its’ success as it got bigger (and thus more complex). My skills did not align with the skills that an executive needed to run a business of this size. The video below I give my take.

I was the SEO director, I had been doing SEO since 1999, and you’d think that I would be a good match for a director role running an SEO division. I enjoyed my job a LOT, but knew that a team of 44 in the div was too much for me to run. I tend to not be the best manager when I end up with large teams underneath my purview. An SEO like me would be the best person to fill the director role, right?

Wrong. I got someone (Larry Waddell) who on LinkedIn describes himself this way:

Executive strategic thinker with COO, CFO and venture-backed CEO experience. Specialties:Entrepreneurship via acquisition, strategy development, and business development

His Skills in his last job are:

Structured technology sharing and channel partner agreements with Fortune 500 firms aligned with Viridity target market verticals
Develop financial models for the energy, capacity, and ancillaries markets in PJM, NYISO and ISONE
Led due diligence response for successful $16 MM Series B equity financing
Created financial models integrating battery storage and renewables into the wholesale ancillaries markets

To truly keep your company thriving, knowing when to step back and admit you are not the right person with the right skills to take it into the future is a CRITICAL admission. I’ve always been able to give up things I love in work, when I passed my expiration date. Have you ever thought what your expiration date is in your organization?

Lets share some of the numbers since I’ve gotten out of the way.

I attribute this to a few people, not just Larry, but Steve, Crystal who really helped level up our ops skills. Dana, Emily who have worked on client success and people success, and many others … (Crystal is our president, whom I gave up the role of running the company to many many years ago).

In 2013 & 2014 (Wil) vs 2017 & 2018 (Larry):
Client churn as % of revenue — 16.9% vs 11.3%.
Net profit as % of revenue — 12.1% vs 23.4% (yes he’s almost 2x’ed me).
Rev Per Head — increased by almost 40%

Did he do this by working people to the freaking bone?
I got one more metric for you, divisional turnover in my last year, vs Larry’s: 
35% (me) vs 19.4% (Larry)

Here are some learnings along the way:

1 — Whose job is it to protect the house? I stop and wondered who on this team is “good at business” vs being “good at the craft”. I figured that in a team of 44 practitioners having 1 person thinking of the business most of their job was a good thing. And having that person being really GOOD at that is perfect. The 44 team members would have each other to ask questions to for how to do the job day to day.

2 — Being too close to the solutions can be blinding! You jump ahead, you make assumptions, you don’t ask questions in client meetings because you know this space so well and at every conference you go to, people remind you how smart you are. A non practitioner coming in has to ask a lot of questions, why are we doing things this way, they ask VERY different questions, why? Because they aren’t practitioners so they don’t often have the skills to dig in on a practitioner problem. Here is an example.

Client asks me as SEO director, why am I not ranking, 90% of the time I’m all up in my tools, Larry couldn’t do that, he had to ask questions like “what would solving this problem do for you”, “what does a successful outcome look like”, “what impact do you expect solving this problem will have on your business”. I’ve gotten to on many occasions watch a non practitioner get to the root of the problem, in ways I glossed over b/c I knew too much.

3 — Your team may grow new leaders. People learned to rely on the practitioner leader to answer their tough practitioner questions. I have an SEO question, let me get Wil. When the leader of a division is NOT a former practitioner, people are like “why go to her” she doesn’t know how to solve y problem. Therein lies the power… a non practitioner gets to deputize others to lead and answer questions, which may spring up some new leaders who weren’t blossoming as much under your leadership.

4 — Your leaders will get better at business. As you scale you want MORE people thinking about the business of the business. Larry was a beast at building frameworks, trainings, and leveling people up on business skills. Which many leaders enjoyed, I never taught my team to read a P&L, so they never learned those skills. I was teaching them the hard skills of SEO. Eventually I would have built a team of leaders who never understood what levers to pull in financial hard times, and good times.

5 — Change management is a skill. Practitioners aren’t always good at the skills of managing change. When we had a month where we lost almost 1 million dollars worth of clients (just as I was handing off the reins of the division), Larry was exactly who we needed, he understood the financial impact, what levers to pull, but more importantly he knew how to shut things down (along with Crystal), focus the div on what mattered, rally the troops and build processes to get us in front of the issues that sprung up to bite us.

As a founder / exec you have to decide if you wanna run the show, or if you want the business to last. It’s not a binary decision, but you have to know which way you are going to lean. For too many execs who were the spark to start something, they can’t get out of their own way to turn that spark into something even greater, they have to make the calls & the final decisions. They can’t admit that what got them to this juncture might not be the skill set to take the team to the next level. My superpower, admitting that has never been a problem, and everyone from my execs, to my team, to my clients are better off because of it.

Note:

Larry reports directly into Crystal, so the two of them collaborated. Their backgrounds are different, Crystal was a practitioner (PPC Account Manager, to PPC Dircetor to Company President) who leveled up as the business grew. Crystal is an example of a practitioner that got her MBA, and made the pivot and never looked back. I’ve seen her single handedly double margins in 4 months before to revive a sluggish division. So it is possible to promote for this from within, but it’s hard for most practitioners to keep up.

Here are 2 other videos I’ve created about this topic:

1 — How Charismatic Leaders Can Fail Their Growing Companies

2 — Knowing When Your Company is Outgrowing Your Skillset & What To Do About It.

Got this in my inbox from Crystal and it really resonated. What would happen if you wiped all meetings and put them through a new rubric to determine their value vs investment of time? You don’t have to clear them all, but put each meeting through the ringer at least 1x per year.

Through the course of the last 2–3–4 years I’ve racked up a lot of meetings, some of which I haven’t gone back to in years to ask myself questions like:

Does that meeting still need me there?

Has me being in that meeting had impact that only I could have? If someone else could have been in that meeting at done the job at least at 80% as well as you maybe you need to train them on that last 20% and back out. Help them grow / take on new challenges.

What meetings am I more of a distraction in that a help? You can tell this by how often you feel like you are slowing the team down on decisions they’ve already made, and you are asking for the backstory.

When I reflect on the re-curring meetings I’ve had, what is different or better as a result? I asked myself this and thought, damn I have a lot of meetings to show people I am invested in them, but TBH nothing has come from it that has had a big impact for the business. It might still be worth it, but who are you missing out on meeting with, or rushing through a meeting with because of this?

Do they align with my insane focus on (Big Data)? Right now I am 100% focused on getting Seer in unique positions to use big data in ways I’m not seeing many people doing just yet. What is that for you? Find it, and ask yourself what % of your meetings reflected that focus? If you want to double revenue in 3 years or decrease turnover by 20%, which meetings are about that? Could current meetings be given more structure to lead you to those goals?

Think of your own rubric, I loved Crystal’s email b/c it is a heads up that meetings are going to be changed and that this is an annual process for her, when you do these as 1-offs it feels shitty to tell someone. When it is part of your process, its a whole different ballgame.

I can’t just CANCEL client meetings, what do I do?

It’s not all about getting rid of the meeting either it is an opportunity to OPTIMIZE the meeting and take a step back with your client. So often we get into rinse, wash, repeat, imagine if you sent to every client of yours a message that said…

How can we get more from out 1 hour a day/week/month together? I believe that there are trends around us we’re not talking about, and we should spend 1 meeting / month talking about those trends and what we are doing to execute on those? Or hey, what part of our meetings are better done in an email and how might we use our time together to tackle bigger issues?

For some tips on asking more consultative questions, I got ya.

Part I — The Stories (skip to part 2 for the takeaways)

2 clients have recently ended their relationship with Seer. I feel like we learn a lot from these and I feel some agencies somewhere must talk about this reality, its not all “Crushing It” this is part of the agency life too. It’s a big part, but I feel like its hard to find people talking about it. So here goes.

Client #1, we worked with for 9 years, Seer has changed a lot in 9 years and it means so much when a client stayed with us / we grew together. They were acquired, so it was painful when we got the call with them saying we’re sticking with our team, in spite of your numbers and past relationship. Instead of thinking about my company, I thought of my clients situation, they were worried about their jobs, their families, etc.

Here is one of the notes I got from this client.

Subject: Farewell {redacted — client name}
Today is so bittersweet for me… Twenty-one years ago I took a job at {Redacted} and in the first week I went to learn about the World Wide Web and how to make websites (remember this is 1997). I developed sites for the four main products and one of those was {redacted}.

Through the years I have continued to be a major part of this sites development, so it is fitting that I am here to see it off into the sunset.

I want to thank each and every one of you for the contributions you’ve made to the success of this site and the {redacted} business in general. I can’t help but imagine what we might have become given more time.

This isn’t goodbye as I will keep in contact with you all via LinkedIn and visits to local pubs 😉

Thank You!!!!

Sometimes its not your fault, so much as your client get acquired and they bring in their crew.

When we lose a client in these circumstances I always remind myself / my team that we are so often brought in by former clients when they move on to new places, so that means we have been the company brought in by our POC to replace the encumbant, right? So when we’re high fiving that we won that deal well the other firm was losing a client, making tough decisions, whom to keep, how long to keep them, severance, etc? Sometimes its our turn to take the hit.

Client #2 The 5 year run with one of the largest companies on the planet, growing faster than almost any other company on the planet.

How did it start?

So I refreshed my inbox, boom a lead, great I opened it and was like…uh what! This can’t be real, it was! We were referred in by a former client who moved on to “BigCo”.

Originally we were hired to run 4 Million in annual spend in the US & UK, over time the client compared our results to their “Boots on the Ground” teams in 100+ countries, and decided that our PPC team could outperform global teams who had local contextual knowledge. Over 5 years we went from running 4 million in < 10 countries to 35 Million in 100+ countries. Needless to say this client got BIG. But we kept them under 10% of Seer’s total revenue.

They recently came to us telling us they were RFP’ing a project after 5 years of working together as they needed more support globally. We also had made some small to medium sized mistakes along the way, but that was not the driver.

I wasn’t thrilled but I was grateful that our client was giving us a heads up many months out that they might be looking at other options. That was a huge vote of trust. Trust that we wouldn’t start performing poorly if we got the hint that they might move elsewhere.

We also had client relationship managers in place, as a growing agency, you hit a point at which consultants keep working on getting good at the skills for the job, but ask yourself who is sharpening their saw on managing relationships, asking the bigger questions, etc.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Part II — What do you do?

1 — When is your biggest client TOO BIG?

Early on within my first 2–3 years of running Seer (around 2005) I decided that I never wanted to have a client be more than 12% of our revenue, I don’t know why 12. It just felt right.

You have to decide this as well (or choose not to make a limitation). But this limitation helped drive a lot of future decisions. For instance when we closed a massive deal and that client became more than 12%, we’d celebrate, but then quickly get back to finding another big deal / growing a client to offset this new big client. We really never let ourselves get excited about the big deal, we got excited when they were diluted below 12%.

Of all the reports I would get from finance this was the one I looked at most closely. As I never wanted to be a client’s bitch, I never wanted a client to be too much of our revenue, where we couldn’t choose to walk away someday is the relationship got abusive / too one sided. I feel that the “we lost a client, we must cut people to maintain margin” approach isn’t for me, but sometimes high concentration of a client could lead to layoffs, for instance here you see 2 clients left, 40 people lost their jobs. Or in this example where 1 client left 82 people lost their gig. If you are interviewing at a company, find out their concentration risk, helps you determine YOUR risk.

2 — Layoffs & how long are you willing to hold down losses / lack of profit?

Lose a client, do layoffs, must maintain margins. Its how agencies work. I disagree, I think we can do better. As an executive you have to decide, if you have a large client who leaves, are you going to do layoffs immediately, 4 weeks, 4 months? If you keep your largest client to a small part of your revenue, it makes it easier, but if a client is 20–50% of your rev (which I see at a lot of agencies) it creates a squeeze you can NOT hold down with savings 99%opf the time. Knowing in advance how you want to deal with this situation is key. When you lose your largest client are you willing to have a break even year w/ no profit, or to cut benefits, or have no raises across the company to save 5–8–80 jobs?

I’ll discuss that in #3 below.

2a — be CAREFUL if you are growing fast

I once got caught and I learned a big lesson. If you are smaller and your largest client is 50k/year and your average project is 25,000. There is a good chance that in your mind you can reasonably go close a 50k deal or (2) 25k deals so holding down the team for a month or two while you swoop in, close deals and save the day is possible, you can probbaly look back at your past data and see times when you’ve done that before. BUUUUT!….

What happens when you closed a 50k/year deal 5 years ago and your average project back then was 25,000 and today your average project is 35k… BUT that 50k largest client 5 years ago has grown 10x. So over 5 years your largest client went from 50k/year to 500k/year and sure your average deal has increased from 25k to 35k, which is GREAT! When you look back, have you ever closed a 500k deal in your life? Shit have you ever closed 5 100k deals in 1 month? Doubt it. This is where you get stuck, and this is where a great sales and marketing team is an insurance policy eve if in good times you have to turn away a lof of the business they bring you. I have been in this situation once and HOLY CRAP was it hard to overcome the big client loss 6–7 years ago, I went to put on my cape and close 2–3 deals and realized that in closeing those 2–3 deals I was only making up 35% of what I needed. That made for some long exhuasting nights.

3 — What to do with the unbillable people?

Personally for me, I take the hit in margin b/c it’s not about the money. It’s about doing great work with great people. You have options here, layoffs are one. We covered that above. You can also consider the following:

How replaceable do you see your team? If you believe you can go back in the market and pick people up later, layoffs might be easier to process if you want to maintain margins. For me, I believe that every day part of our job is to retain these folks and give them a reason to bring their skills and talents here, that is our greatest challenge. Finding another client is easier than finding another great teammate for us.

How strongly do you believe in your sales & marketing staff to get deals done? Can they turn things around and start replacing that revenue overnight? Do they have a plan that they pull out any time large client leaves? Or are the scrambling to make up a plan in the midst of the loss? (chaos). How bought in are they, are they willing to put in those extra hours to save someone’s job? Are you?

Do you have other areas of your business that are growing? If that answer is yes, might you be able to shift people from one division to the next? Do you have an innovation area that is growing your next big thing? Which people on that team are aligned with your future? Retain them as long as you can.

Turn your freed up staff on business development. But keep in mind some people have a nose for opportunity and want to blow that up, others are great consultants but they don’t get tthat dopamine hit when they close a deal. So just saying “we’ll put you on BD isn’t always wise, have a plan on how to take someone who thinks sales is “scary” or uncomfortable, and have ways they can really contribute or keeping them around might not be the best call.

Double down on your other clients who might grow someday to offset that revenue. Give them a call and say:

Hey I noticed you have XYZ in your backlog, and we want to get that done for you, I’m going to get you X more hours per month to help us get through that backlog, no charge. Then you can turn around and say hey, I got people here I gotta feed, could we increase our out clause to 60 days, even if just in spirit (not contractual) that if you think you are outgrowing us, or you can’t use us that you’ll let me know early so I can make sure we do right by our people?

4 — Make a plan TODAY on what you’ll do

Where is your break in case of emergency plan on what will we do if we lose our largest client? Not having a plan, means you are making it up under panic & duress, which is the wrong time to do it.

What you will do on the day your largest client leaves? Panic? Or Break out that plan and execute?

Note: Put a re-occurring reminder in your calendar every 6 months (something we didn’t do) to review the plan. I got this idea reading a book 5 years ago on vacation, needless to say, we hadn’t lost our largest client in 5 years, so when we went to open them plan, it was not applicable to the company we had become over 5 years.

There’s a reason why in school you had fire drills, so in the case that someday a fire happens, you’ve practiced over and over again what to do. You don’t want to lose your client and start planning at that moment.

5 — Team Transparency, how much is too much?

When you get a major heads up from your client, that is a good thing. What are you going to do with that information? You can tell your team early and you might spook them, they might resent the client, etc — all of which impacts the relationship.

No transparency? One day you walk in and tell the team, you’ve had this information for weeks or months and didn’t tell them. I bet in that time you were acting different, yet by you holding more information than the team for that long, you left it to them to try to figure out what is going on. I talked about this “distance” in this video:

Not telling your team what is up once you have a solid understanding sucks, you are able to prepare, you and your executive team might be thinking, now isn’t a good time to buy that new car or splurge on that vacation as my raise / bonus might not happen, but your team DOES NOT know that, so they could be making financial decisions that might hurt in the long haul b/c you had more information than they did. Just consider this, and try to be transparent as early as you can be.

6 — Who is forward looking for the client / industry?

When your largest fastest growing client is undergoing change at an insane pace.

Whose job is it to see those changes coming and pivot projects or prep the team?
Whose job is it to get the spidey senses that something is off and dig in on that or know that their competitor took 15 points of their market share year over year?
Whose job is it to be planning for 12 months from now, TODAY?

Your team of consultants? Rarely.

At Seer as we gained larger clients we realized it was a separate role to have someone whose job it is to get that client out of the day to day tasks coming from the consultants and to manage the relationship, and also be on the lookout asking questions like are people & tools we have today are what that client will need in 6 months, 12 months and beyond?

I’ll tell you your consultants are spending most of their day trying to keep up with the client and all their day to day changes, that is a HUGE ask. Rarely do they have the time to look out 6 months and ask those questions. Get a separate person who manages the relationship, not at a tactical day to day level, but also at a if they keep growing, why won’t they do this themselves level?

7 — Contractors Mitigate Risk

I could have hugged Crystal the day she dropped this idea on me, I was in San Diego working from our office there, she was in Philly.

She was calculating how much of our team members were deployed on this one client, as that number got bigger and bigger it created 2 issues.

1 — Keeping up with a client growing this fast is TOUGH on your team members, while its exciting it also is just hard when a company is growing this fast and pivoting daily. But the bigger issue is

2 — If the client leaves you have a HUGE chunk of your expected costs tied up into one project.

Once she calculated that she got with our client relationship lead Dana and Dana asked the client if we could add in contractors for certain parts of the project, which would mean we would the offset some of our risk to a team of people who are used to managing that risk, contractors.

This approach also helped us ramp up resources as the client keeps growing in new areas. Fast growing clients move fast and break things, today’s priority is tomorrow’s let’s hold off a year, and to ramp up and down with those requests and changes requires a strong bench at the ready. This lets us continue being a strong & responsive partner and to help us live into what we felt we needed to do should we continue working w/them longer term.

I also LOVE how Crystal managed it, she wanted us to see these team members as just that TEAM MEMBERS, not disposable contractors. So for instance I meet with everyone in the company when they start, she wanted me to meet with the contractors too (which I think is in process), she wanted to chat with them too the same way she does for new hires. She wanted us to be 100% transparent with them about the client situations, etc.

When it came time and we got that news from the client, we were able to give our contractors the heads up too, some even asked, how can we help Seer recoup some of that loss. (A blog post for another day is about how often people who are jilted about agency life sometimes turn into teammates)

8 — Never be afraid to say “We don’t do that”

In early 2018 we started discussions with this client about their itch for local boots on the ground in all these countries. We felt that they needed it, and we reminded them that we wouldn’t likely be the right partner for them if that was the need. 9 months later here we are, they are moving on.

If your client is outgrowing your offering, that might be OK, maybe you are not the right company to take them from B to C, but you were the perfect company to take them from A to B. You lose trust when you start pitching your client on areas that are explicit needs for them and it is a major stretch to deliver. We stretched a LOT with this client, but we were always honest with them.

Keep in mind people wil judge you by your weakest offering, not your strongest, even if your weakest is only 2% of the project. Be careful, that little 2% stretch could become their sole focus, taking their attention away from the 98% where you are killing it. BE CARFUL!

Here is an example of how these requetss went down: The client would say, hey can you run these XYZ campaigns for us. We would vet our capabilities and come back with something like: (1)Yes, (2) NOT Today, but we feel we can learn over 3 weeks and ramp up quick, which then the client was empowered to say, sure we’d rather you all keep doing this for us, or NO this is critical, so thank you for the honesty but we gotta go elsewhere for this or (3) No — we aren’t the best fit here for you. Every request was met with this approach, it helped them know what to expect and it kept us honest, and our team, members were shown that we were OK saying no to some things, which I think is important.

Ultimately that was our undoing here, the clients newest set of needs, we could only do 20% of well, the other 80% was not our strong suit, Dana, an exec at Seer (along with some help from executive Larry) built this dispassionate exercise, we stripped out the emotion of “we’d like to keep the client / we like working with them” and lead with what is best for the client.

We went through an exercise with the client (they liked how we distilled the decisions down into 1 chart decided to use this in their new agency evaluation), here is it:

Dispassionately, we had to look at what Seer could do for them based on their new needs (and yes we shared this with our client as part of the exercise):

We had to say, if we’re making our true north what is best for the client, we could only take a sliver of their business, the vast majority we were not able to reasonably cover / perform well.

9 — Celebrate, YES Celebrate & Learn.

Don’t celebrate for long, but never lose sight that your company was able to:

A) Land a client of this size
B) Keep up with them during one of their fastest growing phases for YEARS
C) Maintain a relationship for YEARS!
D) Learn from it

Your company, for both good and maybe some bad too, learned a lot in the process, shame if you allow this opportunity to become 100% about the loss and 0% about the learning. You had to have learned a ton, watch for emerging leaders on the team that lost the client, they might say “I’ll take responsibility for helping us to learn what to keep doing, what to do differently, what can our BD & marketing teams learn about the dynamics of a company like this, how they make decisions, etc, what can my HR team learn about staffing up for these companies while they are growing.” If you have to make a choice about who to keep and who to let go, those who think “whew, that’s over” might have a different long term value to your business than those who think, “what can we learn, and how can I help make this company better?”

We even have this client coming in to invest time on what they think we should do more of, less of, etc. A sign of a great partnership is even when leaving they are dedicated to helping us get better.

So cheers to you if you were able to hold on and thrive with a client, CRUSHING their goals quarter after quarter after quarter, esp when that client is WAY outside of your typical deal range & especially when you can do it for an extended period of time. If you lose them in a year maybe not so much.

10 — Offboard w/ integrity, live to fight another day

Your financial model will tell you to shift hours, trim back, cut, redeploy the team. Maybe you are angry, you are right to feel that, all of that. DO NOT LET THAT KEEP YOU FROM DOING THE RIGHT THING FOR YOUR CLIENT!

How you exit a client sends signals, signals to your team. Are we the kind of company who gets mad and stops doing great work? Or do we cross the finish line running as hard as we started the race? That’s integrity, pride in your work, signal that to your team.

Be good to the new agency too!
Not only are we working on with the new agency on transitions, but we also outlined for our client what parts of the project to offboard first given their needs & where we weren’t the strongest fit, this helped them ramp up the other agency FIRST on areas where Seer wasn’t as strong, again another signal of putting the client needs first.

You’ll also be signaling that to your client! They’ll remember you as someone with integrity, that kept to your word and saw things through, which has lead to 2 referrals from this client to other divisions while they are offboarding us.

While I could write another post about crushing it, do we really need another one of those? I am intentionally trying to write more and more about the parts that I wish were out there more, running an agency isn’t easy, losing your largest client isn’t easy, and I hope that by sharing this, more agencies learn from what we’ve learned and more agencies feel OK sharing the struggle. Losing your largest client has put MANY agencies completely out of business or created a downsizing they never could recover from, I fully expect Seer to grow again next year and given how much we crushed goals this year we’ve made up well over 75% of this clients revenue already.

In 2014 Adam Grant tweeted this:

And I thought. Damn, a manual to how to work with a manager is a GREAT idea. We all have our own nuances and ways we look at ourselves, but you need your team to feel emotionally safe to say stuff about working with you, or you’ll get flufy answers. So I recently asked my team to help come up with a manual for me (and I decided to add my own).

Without a manual your team will start from a blank slate and make it all up, so why not give them a head start? Here’s my head start on what it’s like to work with me.

If you are actually interested in what its like to work with me, the feedback came in from people who have worked with me for as long as 11 years and as little as 4 weeks.

You are going to find these things out about me eventually so I figured I’d give you a jump start! I got this by asking several people for their insights on working with me. TL:DR = See below.

Trust

Others View of Me

• It takes a while to trust that Wil can be taken at face value but once you do, it clicks. He’s explicit with the things he cares about and the company he wants to run. Trust his word, don’t waste time trying to read between the lines and reverse engineer his algorithm. At the end of the day: be good to your team, be good to your clients, live into our ETHIC values, be data driven.
• I’d add take it personally, your name is on every email, or deliverable, take pride in what you put your name on.
• The truth always
• Accepting of mistakes, but not of lies
• Fall on your sword when you need to, he’ll help you up and brainstorm how to move forward
• Use your best judgement — no red flags, just move vs. “ask permission” (but be ready to seek forgiveness in some cases — refer back to “fall on your sword”)
• Instead of asking for permission ask for forgiveness”- When working with Wil trust your gut and make decisions
• Bring ideas & questions to the table but always have state a clear ‘why’ & the data to back them up
• Wil Brings a ton of ideas to the table — dont be afraid to ask questions to understand importance & priority AND then RE-SET expectations clearly on what you will resources you will need or what you will need to DE-PRIORITIZE to get the ‘new’ idea done (**see section below on memory!)

My take:

• I place a ton of value in expectation setting and clear deadlines for a project. Want the key to my heart :)? Just deliver when you say you’re going to and you will build trust with me quickly.
• When you make a promise you build hope, when you follow through you build TRUST
• Ask yourself, if I was the client, how would I want to be treated.
• I start off trusting everyone 100% until they do something that diminishes trust. I believe instinctively in our gut we know the right thing to do in tough situations, we allow overthinking to prevent us from just doing the right thing.
• I like you to tell me what you intend to do, because that helps me determine your growth / alignment
• Trust keeps you moving, testing ,and without road blocks — this is 1 way to earn it

Don’t get it twisted:

Others View of Me

• Respect in, respect out. Don’t take his humility and enablement for a lack of confidence in his own opinions. It took me a while to realize but if you go head to head with Wil over something based in opinion, either he’ll drop it because he doesn’t care or you’ll bring data to change his mind. If it’s not something he can drop and you don’t have data, be prepared to take go his route, he’s where he is for a reason.
• With Wil the highs are higher and the lows are lower. If you do a great job at something, few bosses will hype you up more and put you on a high like Wil. You screw something up (something that he perceives violates his values), few bosses will make you feel worse. There’s definitely a guard you need to develop when you’re led by someone as passionate and emotional as Wil.
• (FYI, I thought this was the best characterization of me, I haven’t had someone nail my personality so well, I would have never thought of this myself, but when I did see it, it made 100% sense)
• Little patience for moving slow on things that could have real impact / are critically important because of making it perfect, figuring out all the details, being afraid to seek help (b/c maybe its something YOU can’t personally move forward), etc.;You should execute something you are proud of fast, set expectations you will iterate and improve over time.

My take:

• Once I label you as something it sticks for a while (good or bad), it is hard for me to shake that, so I recommend if you wanna shake my perceptions or prove to me my perception is wrong its best to send a doc that outlines what you are going to do, and start doing those things and hitting the dates you said you would, all the while keeping me in the loop. Do not go heads down for 3 months on something and THEN spring up, like look at what I did.
• You’d be surprised at how OK I am with you saying “I know I said friday but XYZ came up and its a more important goal, so I’m pushing you back 2 weeks”, what confuses me is when you create dates and don’t hit even know you missed them, I interpret that as a person who:

Doesn’t have a system to keep track of their promises

Over promises and under delivers, and is afraid to say I can’t get to it on X day, lets try Y

Breaks promises without thinking twice about it.

• I will always feel like I owe it to our clients to make sure they get all the value they can from working with us, I take their investment in Seer quite seriously! If I am ever checking in on a client data, assume its because I feel like I owe it to them. If it wasn’t for clients I would have nothing.
• I am likely to overreact to clients treating our team poorly, I just don’t tolerate that, as such make sure you are kicking ass & doing the best you can, so if I gotta come down on a client I got proof you’ve done all you could and that you’ve shown extreme care for them.
• Having me work on your clients can be a double edged sword, you’ll learn a ton on how I manage client issues and how I do search, you will learn a ton in a short time, but you might also catch a TON of flack from me if I felt your attitude was one of “I tried” vs “I am doing everything I can to help this client be successful, let me show you my 10 pivots, my data for those pivots, my team wide calls for help, etc etc”
• I’m a kind guy who spends time volunteering with youth, but I am also competitive AF and will work tirelessly to beat people. I will never say I’m the best, b/c there is no measure of that, but I will never stop trying to be better tomorrow than I was today.
• I understand that most people need to unplug and relax, I don’t — I get energy from working with and helping talented people do amazing work. That is how I regenerate / recharge. So every flight I take has wifi, every phone has international unlimited data, I want to be available to you if you need me, if I need to take a break or want to be present with my family for 2 hours, 2 days, or 2 weeks straight, it has nothing to do with my need to get away from the work, the people, and the clients, its more about something having a higher priority.
• If I sense you have my back (personally) there is NOTHING I won’t do to show you I have yours too. I’m insanely loyal.
• If you didn’t see something to completion, and want to tell me why, I see those details as an excuse 95% of the time. It’s ok but I don’t really care about why you didn’t get it done, you are better off saying I missed xyz and I’ll get it done by abc. Then spending that time explaining to me why it didn’t get done, because I see that as further wasting my time.
• Tell me what you want quickly. Don’t come to me with wishy washy asks, be clear and tell me what you need Vs softening me up….it might feel pushy to you, but I love being told what to do.
• Wil, you gotta get me this by XYZ or I won’t hit ABC deadline is how I love to be communicated with.

Sending things to wil (tactical)

Others View of Me

• Don’t worry about making sure something is polished to deliver to Wil. Just get it done, be concise, be purposeful.
• Find a way forward, even if it’s not through you. It’s better to acknowledge to Wil that you, personally, can’t do something rather than claim it can’t be done.
• Come to Wil with a proposed solution and rollout date by if no response.
• Use as many specifics and as much data as you can to make the decision a no brainer
• Don’t leave emails open ended, try ending them with I intend to
• If long email use a TLDR and put that at the top
• Be visual if possible..more graphs less numbers
• The best emails are the ones that show option a,b,c which allows wil to respond with a letter
• Whenever entering a meeting with Wil have a set goal / what you want to accomplish by the end of the meeting

My Take:

• If I have to scroll at ton, or click on tabs, you’ve made me less likely to read your stuff
• Move me to BCC quickly, then bring me back when the details have been fleshed out
• Have a hypothesis, “I believe, let me show you my data which supports hat belief” is music to my ears
• I don’t care about how pretty your docs are, I care about how solid your assumptions are how you arrived at them, making it look on brand is a waste of time.
• I value speed, if you are going to go slow you better have a good reason for it, if you have good reason, I will listen, just ask Crystal 🙂
• Put a FUT in the CC of any email where you make a promise, in that way when it boomerangs back, you and I both know you gotta follow up today.
• I’m horrible at texting, if you IM me, I’ll forget everything in there, my inbox & calendar is how I live.

My biggest weakness = memory & being scatter brained

My Take

• I could ask you to do something and completely forget about it within 48 hours. It’s okay to remind me — I welcome/appreciate it. I’m human and involved in a million things… if I owe you something and forget — please don’t hesitate to follow-up.
• I’m pretty aware of my shortcomings, never be afraid to remind me of them.
• Never start an update on a status item assuming I what you are talking about, please remind me. The goal of this deliverable is X (you might have to tell me that every time we meet)
• Even better: hey wil do you know what this bullet point means? Odds are I’m going to say no.
• Start off a meeting reviewing what we talked about last meeting, it helps ground me.
• I take it VERY seriously when I set deadlines and forget or miss them, I feel those commitments are promises that I broke, don’t let me off the hook b/c I am “busy” hold me to high account to the things I say I will do, as I will be doing the same to you.
• I have such a shitty memory that I might ask you quite abruptly to slow down & let me process your good ideas or repeat it a couple times.
• When in deep thought I am highly likely to close my eyes (tightly) or look away, it’s the way I focus, block out the 100 ideas in my head and process the 1 in front of me.
• I will cut you off at times usually because I’m trying to get something out before I forget, not because I’m intentionally rude. I try not to though.
• Keep this in mind, as I might also says quite abruptly “This is too much detail” or “lets keep moving” it’s my way of saying I trust that you’ve got the details nailed. Lets keep things at the brainstorm level.
• Because I’m forgetful there’s a good chance I may tell you something this week and the opposite the next, just remind me, I wont be offended.

How I see my role at Seer

• Eliminate roadblocks — I move time and money (since we don’t have investors/partners, I don’t have to ask anyone to move money), so if you convince me something is worth while and we can’t find a way to get to it quickly. However I trust our exec team, so even though I do not HAVE to ask their permission to move money to speed something up, I highly value and rely on their counsel, we collaborate they make ideas better, more stable, more scalable.
• I’ll ask you to come to me for time or money convos, how can I move time or money to help us keep moving.
• Speed — keep us moving fast in spite of being “bigger”
• Impact your career — Create a platform for potentially career trajectory altering opportunities, its up to you to take advantage of that if that is what you want.
• Help you grow — Ensure having Seer Interactive on your resume opens doors for you
• Innovate — I never want to be caught flat footed, so I want to keep playing with pockets of the web to find the next big thing that we have that others don’t (that clients see value in).
• Keep us from doing it the same way we always did
• Fight being on the wrong side of disruption — I’m a wartime leader, I’m paranoid that someday this amazing ride will come to an end b/c I rested on my laurels, didn’t move fast enough, etc. So keep that in mind. I live in fear of getting lazy or complacent. I believe in pushing myself to the limit to remind myself I’m not taking it easy, I’ll hand wash dishes, I’ll go for a run in the rain or snow, I’ll get up at 4:30 am just to prove to myself I’m not getting lazy and I’m not allowing myself to listen to my own excuses.
• Much of this posts nails me (not all): https://a16z.com/2011/04/14/peacetime-ceowartime-ceo-2/

Your Growth

• You will commonly hear me say, “what do you think?” Never mistake it for me being challenging or to put you on the spot. I like to understand how people came to their conclusions and what data they are bringing to their statements. I also thoroughly enjoy seeing something through a new lens and learning from my peers.
• Don’t be afraid to take a chance and try something new, why even be here at Seer if you are playing it safe? If you come to me with a thought out plan, a hypothesis backed by data, and a clear timeline… I am always down to listen. I want people to disrupt shit and I’ll make the time to help you flesh out ideas.
• I thin slice your job performance
• Participate in things I might see, lists, groups, volunteer efforts, send reads that show how you manage, etc. In the absence of that I will always assume you aren’t doing those things.
• If you tell me you want something in your career and I dont get a regular update on your progress I will assume you don’t care enough to put in the work and I won’t put in the work either.
• Do not assume your wins are making it to me via your manager
• I Admire longevity people who stick with something week in and week out, and have sent updates every. freaking. week.
• Best example is Ryan F — who has sent what I am working on emails every week for 2 years straight, gonna miss you buddy!! Good luck in the new gig. Even if he’s going to be out he sends it on thursday (That’s follow through)
• Admire small things, sometimes I value more seeing you pick up garbage that isn’t yours, than crushing that client meeting.
• I’d rather build people up than tear people down, so I’m great at telling you “you killed it” not so great at critical feedback, my style is just to avoid it and usually just give up on someone than to keep at feedback over and over.

My Growth

• I still have a lot to learn about myself, so if you have other ideas or things you’ve noticed, please let me know, this is a journey of self discovery and I’m still on it. This list is not all encompassing.
• I’m addicted to growth, so know I’m always seeking to make things better, the people we work with, the communities we work in, the clients we work with, and the people at Seer, I am not addicted to financial growth, I am addicted to impact growth.

I could hear her saying it without even meeting with her …Wil, you’ve been working remote for years…stop fooling yourself!!

As Crystal and I had an other chats (I try to think WWCD before I approach her with ideas) she helped me realize something that took me a while to get to…On any given day I might see at most 10% of Seer’s employees even in passing. Our Philly office where I spend 60% of my time (15–20% is spent in San Diego) and the rest is somewhere in the world or on a plane.

While working in San Diego isn’t remote in theory, it is to our remote team members and our team members in Philly and vice versa. She was right (she usually is, which is why she runs the company)…

In My Imaginary Crystal Conversation…She wasn’t done with me yet, she piled on…

Hey Wil, we want our team members out there with clients and at conferences, right….I said right…then BAM she reminded me of this:

Damn! A lot of our team is NOT in the office anyway, when they are on site at a client or a conference, they are…working remote.

She still wasn’t done…when you add up all the flex time (work from home) + holidays + vacation we have a LOT of people NOT HERE or working remote:

She still wasn’t done…Our company is changing, we want to be a great place to work for parents, and parents bring…sick kids, and sick kids require work from home a lot.

You add up these 4 realities (and at ton of others, like getting a more competitive talent pool, cost of real estate, the fact we have one person working 20 hours a week traveling the world, she stops by her home base for holidays 😃, etc etc). and Its like lets jump in….

So, if you are one of the hundreds of people who over the years have said…hey Wil, I’d love to work with Seer, but I’m not able to relocate to Philly or San Diego, this might be the right time, so hit me up on LinkedIn.

I’ll reply with a quick form to fill out just so we know where people are and who is interested (maybe we’ll get a local co-working space), if we see strong matches, we’ll consider giving you a holler. We are especially looking for people who are seasoned at managing client accounts in search & analytics.

Wish us luck, if you have any ideas on how to be a great company with a couple HQs and remote, I would love to get some comments, as this is new to us (and a bit scary), but its the right thing for our clients, and thus we have to figure this out, if not today, tomorrow. Thank you!