DeepSpecialization_Steve Guberman_EP 89_Audio_Edited_V1
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[00:00:00] Steve Guberman: I'm pulling the plug. I'm quitting my job. I'm going to open my agency and that's going to be the full time endeavor.
[00:00:05] Corey Quinn: The best CEOs surround themselves with people who will tell them the truth, regardless of whether or not it's going to make them feel good.
[00:00:11] Steve Guberman: When you're all things to all people and you're like, everything is custom.
[00:00:15] Steve Guberman: It's an instant ticket to losing money. It's easier to sell your level of [00:00:20] expertise and be sought after as an advisor and an expert and a strategist. When you say these are the industries that we are experts in and the work shows that as well.
[00:00:29] Corey Quinn: Welcome to the Deep Specialization Podcast, the show where we blend focus, strategy, and client intimacy in order to scale and simplify our businesses and our lives.
[00:00:38] Corey Quinn: I'm your host, Corey [00:00:40] Quinn. Let's jump into the show. Today, I'm excited to welcome Steve Guberman to the Deep Specialization Podcast. Steve has over 25 years experience in creative marketing, advertising, and PR. He has built and sold his own successful agency after a decade, then [00:01:00] worked on the corporate side.
[00:01:01] Corey Quinn: And now he helps agency owners unearth their challenges and build the agencies of their dreams. I think that's a tagline that you use. I love that line, by the way.
[00:01:11] Steve Guberman: Thanks, I'll trademark it.
[00:01:12] Corey Quinn: Yeah, you should. Steve's the founder of Agency Outside and the host of the Agency Bytes podcast. [00:01:20] Welcome, Steve.
[00:01:20] Steve Guberman: Thank you. It's good to be here. Excited to get into this with you.
[00:01:24] Corey Quinn: Yeah, absolutely. It's always great to get another agency expert pro and a coaching consultant, uh, on the show. I always learn something. So this, this is going to be awesome. So given your agency background, uh, you've been in house, [00:01:40] you've worked in house, you've owned an agency.
[00:01:41] Corey Quinn: Now you're an agency coach. How has all of this experience helped you to really have a perspective on what makes a great agency and, or make an agency successful?
[00:01:54] Steve Guberman: Well, that's a great question. The first thing that comes to mind is, you know, when you, I'm sure you do a lot of [00:02:00] mentorship or talk to college kids and they're like, where do I go from here?
[00:02:03] Steve Guberman: And you're like getting the internship in house and then at an agency and then at a bigger agency and then a bigger, and like that way you've got a flavor of like. What you like, what you don't like, where you thrive, where you don't thrive. I feel I have a really diverse background because I've been in the [00:02:20] hell pits of corporate and I've worked at different agencies and interned at different agencies and had my own shop and then worked at a few other places.
[00:02:28] Steve Guberman: So the diversity of like my experiences, I think just gives me that much more value of what I can bring to helping other agencies, but ultimately that business, whatever [00:02:40] business it is. Needs to, I think, adopt the values and the personality of the founder and their vision. And so whatever their background is going to is, is going to define what their vision for the businesses and what values that they operate under.
[00:02:56] Corey Quinn: Okay. So I want to get into that, but first along your journey, I want to [00:03:00] know of all of the different stops along the way, which was your favorite?
[00:03:04] Steve Guberman: Honestly, I had an internship when I was in college for a good friend, Alan Brooks in Princeton, New Jersey. It was called Alan Brooks Design. He later brought in a partner and rebranded under Verge 180, I think.
[00:03:18] Steve Guberman: Yeah, I think, I think that's what it was. [00:03:20] There was a number there. I think it was Verge 180. And, uh, I learned so much there. I got so inspired there. I got to like really be hands on as. A college student as an intern touching client work and designing and building paste ups and mock ups. And so that set my like design career on fire, like [00:03:40] in the greatest of ways.
[00:03:41] Steve Guberman: And Alan and I are still friends, you know, decades later. So,
[00:03:45] Corey Quinn: Oh my God, that's amazing. Yeah. So it's safe to say, so you were mostly your skill base, at least originally was on the design side.
[00:03:51] Steve Guberman: Yeah. I went to school for design. I've been an artist my whole life and sadly I do very little design these days.[00:04:00]
[00:04:00] Corey Quinn: And tell me about the agency you launched and eventually sold.
[00:04:03] Steve Guberman: So the agency was called Fifth Room Creative. We were in Denville, New Jersey. So I, we were living down the shore in New Jersey. That's a ubiquitous term if you're in New Jersey down the shore. And I was freelancing. I was working for an agency full time as a creative director and freelancing [00:04:20] on the side.
[00:04:21] Steve Guberman: And freelance rates down, you know, at the Jersey shore at the time were like 35 maybe 40 bucks an hour. And I had friends that were in North Jersey, just outside the city and New York city. And they were like, you know, 75 ish bucks an hour. And so we had an opportunity to move North. My wife at the time had a baby.
[00:04:39] Steve Guberman: We had [00:04:40] another baby on the, on the way. And we were like, let's. Let's move north. And I said, I'm doing it. I'm pulling the plug. I'm quitting my job. I'm going to open my agency and that's going to be the full time endeavor. And so a lot of what I modeled the agency after was what I learned at, at my friend, Alan Brooks agency, verge 180, on how we did [00:05:00] proposals and how we sought out clients and how we.
[00:05:03] Steve Guberman: Priced thing. And so I learned a lot of the operational side of the business from him, but I wanted it intentionally to stay very boutique, five, six people. I wanted, you know, the services that I wanted to do were the things that I loved delivering. So again, it was very much built around me and [00:05:20] my personality for the first bunch of years until we grew beyond that.
[00:05:24] Corey Quinn: Yeah. And you, I think you had it for maybe 10 years. Is that correct?
[00:05:27] Steve Guberman: Yeah. We sold, uh, just, just after the 10th anniversary.
[00:05:30] Corey Quinn: And what year was that? I'm curious.
[00:05:32] Steve Guberman: 10 years ago. So 2015, 14 or 15,
[00:05:35] Corey Quinn: 10, 10, 10 year anniversary of,
[00:05:38] Steve Guberman: of the say on your
[00:05:39] Corey Quinn: 10 year old, [00:05:40] yeah, that's exciting.
[00:05:41] Steve Guberman: Yeah.
[00:05:42] Corey Quinn: And now obviously you're focused on agency coaching and, and mentoring.
[00:05:46] Corey Quinn: I'm curious since, you know, I'm really focused my career on specialization and the impact and specialization. I was curious to ask you, you know, from your perspective and your experience. You know, what does, what role does [00:06:00] specialization play in agency success and, you know, what are some ways that you guide agencies to find the right niche?
[00:06:10] Corey Quinn: What are your thoughts about that?
[00:06:11] Steve Guberman: Yeah. I mean, I fought in itching for years at my agency and we floundered around a lot and we had some, you know, through a discovery process, we realized, all right, [00:06:20] we, we were niched in a number of verticals, but I thought. I, I don't want to get bored and just do, you know, FinTech or higher ed or whatever, you know?
[00:06:28] Steve Guberman: So I had this egotistical creative mind of, uh, you know, very prima donna. I'm going to get too bored. Uh, and I think a lot of creative professionals have that. And so I didn't realize the value in owning either a [00:06:40] horizontal or a vertical niche. And so, you know, for the first few years, we were all things to as many people as we could convince that we were all those things for you need this.
[00:06:49] Steve Guberman: Oh yeah, we can do that. Oh yeah, we can do that. Challenges there are. multitude of challenges, you know, the first is, I don't know who to, who to market to. I don't know [00:07:00] where to spend my time marketing. If I don't, if I'm not, you know, niched in a certain vertical or specific grouping of verticals services, we did, uh, hone down to branding and web.
[00:07:11] Steve Guberman: And we stopped there. We didn't do, you know, ongoing marketing. We, you know, we. Branding and web branding comprised graphic design and identity [00:07:20] and things like that. But it was all around the visual part of it. So we'd bring in people to help us with like mission, vision, values and strategy and things like that.
[00:07:27] Yep.
[00:07:28] Steve Guberman: And, um, the other challenge is when you're all things to all people and you're like, everything is custom. It's an instant ticket to losing money. There was no system systemization to things. So we [00:07:40] would build websites. We charged 20, 30 grand. And realize we just lost 10, 000, 13, 000, 15, 000 on something.
[00:07:47] Steve Guberman: Why we've done this a thousand times and because we didn't have a specialization or anything productized, we just kept losing money on, on certain things like that. So a lot of challenges in [00:08:00] not niching, you know, I worked with a business coach probably in my second or third year of business. He convinced me to take a shot and niche down into a number of articles leaning on also, you know, the Blair ends.
[00:08:11] Steve Guberman: Um, When without pitching manifesto of kind of the three legged stool, I've really been. I don't know, nervous about three. [00:08:20] And so I, I leaned on four legs of the stool because all right, if one goes away, you've still got three, you can still stand on, you know, so very, very literal analogy for me, cause I'm a literal kind of person, but so we ended up in consumer tech, higher ed, financial services, and there was a fourth that I just can't seem to recall anymore.
[00:08:38] Steve Guberman: Cause it's been a decade. [00:08:40]
[00:08:42] Corey Quinn: And so in coaching your clients, if you have a client agency who you work with, who's coming to you and. Maybe struggling with some of these things. Is it, you typically guide them to specialize? Is that, is that something you, you find this good advice?
[00:08:56] Steve Guberman: Yeah. I mean, when I, when I get to coach an agency, that's probably the [00:09:00] most repetitive thing that we get into is I know I need to niche, but I don't want to.
[00:09:04] Steve Guberman: You need to be niching. Why are, what do you, you know, it takes courage to make that decision and to really hone your agency. One of the benefits of. Owning a, or multiple verticals is we want to be seen as experts. We don't want to be seen [00:09:20] as you're a generalist. Great. Maybe I'll hire you. And then there's the desperation of please hire me, please hire me.
[00:09:26] Steve Guberman: And when I show up as an expert and you know, my agency is the best B2B tech, you know, branding agency in the world. Well, now people are going to seek me out and when they do, they're going to seek, see me [00:09:40] as, you know, I'm the expert, I'm going to follow your lead and how we're going to engage. I'm going to follow your lead and what you say this is going to cost.
[00:09:47] Steve Guberman: There's no negotiating and how things get done because you're the expert in B2B tech branding. And if you're a generalist, it's like, you know, and literally just had an amazing interview with Blair Enns and we were talking about [00:10:00] this exact. Yeah. Exact topic. And so, yeah, it, it is not easy to say, I'm going to say no to consumer packaged goods.
[00:10:10] Steve Guberman: I'm going to say no to digital marketing and I'm going to stay in my lane. You know, again, just to jump back to my agency, I read Built to Sell, Went Camping [00:10:20] on a Solo Camping Trip in a Weekend. I'm not a great reader. I read that book in a weekend and I got back to the agency on Monday and I said, team meeting.
[00:10:27] Steve Guberman: We're gonna, we're gonna make some changes. So when I'm coaching agencies, it doesn't need to be, it can be, but it doesn't need to be this whole re identity of the agency. Yeah, we got to reposition some messaging. We've got to retarget who we're going [00:10:40] after and in our marketing and how we're talking about, you know, how you're talking about sales, but it's, it's easier to sell your level of expertise and be sought after as an advisor and an expert and a strategist.
[00:10:53] Steve Guberman: When you say, these are the industries that we are experts in and the work.
[00:10:58] Corey Quinn: Is there a process that you take them [00:11:00] through to get them from being a journalist to a specialist in a vertical market or a niche? Is there like, how did what what are the best practices there?
[00:11:08] Steve Guberman: Look at the body of work, you know, maybe there have been in business a number of years and they've, you know, got, you know, a smattering of, of expertise.
[00:11:15] Steve Guberman: Portfolio or case study work, find the ones, you know, go through the process of [00:11:20] breaking it down. These are the industries that are the most profitable. These are industries that let us do our work the best. These are, there's not too few and not too many potential clients, right? There's gotta be the right amount of clients, because if there's too few, there's not enough work to go around.
[00:11:36] Steve Guberman: If there's too many. Then you don't know where to shop and where to [00:11:40] find them, but go through the body of work and bring the team into the process and say, all right, these are the, whatever, seven industries that we've got a good body of work in that we can say, we've got three or four examples here and three or four examples here and which industries are meaningful to the team is, you know, are, are historically [00:12:00] profitable.
[00:12:00] Steve Guberman: You know, we would do this kind of on an annual basis. I do this on a regular basis with clients. Take your. Body of clients and do a review on them of like, who trusts you to do your job and who are your, your really good clients and who are the biggest pains in the ass and the biggest time sucks. And you know, the, the high touch and low, low [00:12:20] pricing and use that to guide of let's own these three or four industries or just as one industry is fine too.
[00:12:27] Yeah.
[00:12:27] Steve Guberman: I think it's a risk and I think it's a risk that pays off in spades.
[00:12:31] Corey Quinn: Why do you think it's perceived as a risk? Like why does it take courage to do this?
[00:12:37] Steve Guberman: If I say no to, you know, I'm, I'm going to say no to all these [00:12:40] other industries that aren't by the way, knocking on our doors anyway, just to focus on these three or four industries again, I think it's like closing off the ego that there's these billions of other businesses that might want to work with me.
[00:12:51] Steve Guberman: They might, but they're not going to come knocking. So, you know,
[00:12:53] I
[00:12:54] Steve Guberman: think it's a risk in that sense, but when we say no to the wrong [00:13:00] opportunities, we leave room open for so many more of the right opportunities. And so I think that's something that gets missed.
[00:13:07] Corey Quinn: I want to dive into some mindset and goals for, for agency founders that you may be working with.
[00:13:14] Corey Quinn: I've heard you talk about the importance of aligning goals with your values. What's a [00:13:20] way for agency owners and founders to clarify their vision and to sort of avoid the copycat goals that you talk about?
[00:13:26] Steve Guberman: Yeah. I think copycat goals are so toxic. I don't know that. Most people know that they have copycat goals because they're chasing somebody else's idea of whatever monthly revenue or top line revenue or number of [00:13:40] headcount or whatever.
[00:13:41] Steve Guberman: But I think that, I think that sometimes it comes down to needing to have like a rude awakening of some sort, you know, I've been spinning my wheels and what I've been chasing after has not been working. And the reason. And one of the reasons why that traction isn't getting, isn't happening [00:14:00] is because if the, if the goals are not intrinsically important to the person that's steering the ship and setting the vision, then the team is also like, that's not authentic.
[00:14:11] Steve Guberman: Why are we chasing this?
[00:14:12] Right.
[00:14:13] Steve Guberman: And so nobody's going to want to row in the right direction or at the same pace or whatever when we're just chasing our [00:14:20] tails. And so year after year, yeah, you might still see 10, 15 percent growth. You might add a headcount here and there. For what, to what end and for what purpose?
[00:14:30] Steve Guberman: So I think there needs to be like a rude awakening at, at some point where somebody says, I've been chasing a million dollars or five million dollars or you know, [00:14:40] 100k MRR or whatever all this time and it really means nothing to me. And again, it comes down to a level of humility of like getting that ego out of the way and saying this isn't really what I need.
[00:14:51] Steve Guberman: It's more headache than I want. My family doesn't want this or need this. What my family really needs is me to be home on [00:15:00] Fridays and Tuesdays at 3 o'clock to pick Timmy up for t ball. How do I build an agency around what that means? And when that value trickles down to the way that the team operates and the team gets treated, now they can see, oh wait, Timmy is really important to the owner, which means my kids are important to the owner, which [00:15:20] means we don't need to work 30 hour days.
[00:15:23] Steve Guberman: To chase a top line rev goal that really is kind of insignificant.
[00:15:29] Corey Quinn: Sure. What do you say, you know, and, and I, and I get that and I think that is. I see that in myself. I see that in others where, you know, we look to our left and to our [00:15:40] right, we see our competitors and we, we all of a sudden compare ourselves to them and say, okay, well, you know, uh, the, the funniest to me, not the funniest, but the, the most ironic metric, at least in my, in my agency days was always how many employees do we have, right?
[00:15:58] Corey Quinn: That was a, that was a, uh, a [00:16:00] vanity metric. That was really important to the CEOs that I worked with when. In reality, if you think about it, you don't want an agency full of thousands of people, right? Because that's your biggest expense. You might rather have the revenue, but none of the people, but I think what you're, you're sharing this copyright goals is very powerful, [00:16:20] uh, this concept because it's, I think it's easy for, for anyone to just.
[00:16:25] Corey Quinn: Pick a goal because someone else chose it and then just, you know, set off in that, in that direction. So you also mentioned about the importance of authenticity about that, that owner being super authentic and what does it actually mean to be authentic [00:16:40] from the perspective of an agency owner?
[00:16:42] Steve Guberman: That's a great question.
[00:16:43] Steve Guberman: I think even taking away the identity of agency owner, like so many of us, our identities are wrapped up in our business and our self value and self worth is wrapped up in what we do for work and the name on the door and things like that. And so even when you strip that away and you [00:17:00] say, you know, what is, how do I be my most authentic self?
[00:17:03] Steve Guberman: It, you know, it's a tough thing to, to have in our industry again, our industry is like a lot of, we, we, it's a lot of ego. It's a, a lot of kind of flash and shine. And so it's, it's being authentic to oneself is [00:17:20] really what is most important to them, the values, the things that they believe in. And listen, there are people that truly, really.
[00:17:29] Steve Guberman: Love their work and want to work more hours than some people. And that's fine for me. It became a toxicity. I loved running my agency that I wasn't present for my [00:17:40] kids. When we were on vacation, I couldn't wait to get back to my agency weekends. Like couldn't wait to get back on a Monday. So I think people need, if they want to understand their own authenticity, I don't ever want to tell anybody what they should or shouldn't do.
[00:17:54] Steve Guberman: But if, if that's important to them, step away from the, from the computer. The [00:18:00] phone, do some journaling about what means something to them and not what they see in other people. You know, we get to doom scroll for too long every day and see a small, small glimpse into somebody else's life or somebody else's business.
[00:18:15] Corey Quinn: Yeah.
[00:18:17] Steve Guberman: And, and so that kind of [00:18:20] break that, that muddies the authenticity that I get to have about who I want to be and how I want to show up for other people every day.
[00:18:27] Corey Quinn: So I'm curious, I was thinking as you were sharing about you were on vacation and wanting to be back, was that authentic for you? Is that where you genuinely wanted to be or were you chasing goals that Uh, you, you realize we're not, we're not truly what you [00:18:40] wanted.
[00:18:40] Steve Guberman: It was a little of both, honestly. I mean, I, I, I didn't have goals and so I was chasing things that were undefined.
[00:18:47] Corey Quinn: Interesting.
[00:18:48] Steve Guberman: Which I think is equally as dangerous, but I also really truly loved running my business and growing it and the work that we were doing, but I didn't know how to have that balance of be present with my kids.
[00:18:59] Steve Guberman: They're only going to [00:19:00] be three, four, five years old once you only get X amount of vacations with them. You only get X amount of weekends. And so, you know, that to me, you know, I didn't realize how fleeting that was going to be.
[00:19:14] Corey Quinn: How old are they now? I'm curious.
[00:19:16] Steve Guberman: My son's 19, and that went by in a blink of an eye, [00:19:20] but the real reason why I didn't realize how fleeting it was is because my daughter passed away at 13, and so it got cut really short.
[00:19:28] Steve Guberman: And we don't expect that, you know, so to me, that was a wake up call.
[00:19:33] Corey Quinn: Wow. Yeah. Um, sorry about that.
[00:19:36] Steve Guberman: Thanks. Sorry to start to bring the energy down there, but no, we're good. It's [00:19:40] to me,
[00:19:41] Corey Quinn: a
[00:19:42] Steve Guberman: lot of people had these kinds of wake ups during COVID. Of what's important and nearly losing a family member or losing a family member or being sick or things like that.
[00:19:52] Steve Guberman: And so we saw a lot of shift during COVID of prioritizing family time and mental health time and things like that. [00:20:00] And frankly, that should always be the priority is, you know, family and personal mental health.
[00:20:07] Corey Quinn: Yeah, you, you mentioned the term, uh, you mentioned the fact that you didn't have defined goals.
[00:20:12] Corey Quinn: You were just sort of chasing down what you thought was right. How would you, in that context, define a [00:20:20] defined goal? Like, what does that look like? Is it written down? Is it something that's communicated? Like what, what would be a goal that is sort of well defined in that context?
[00:20:30] Steve Guberman: At its simplest, it should, in order for it to be effective, it's got to be owned, right?
[00:20:36] Steve Guberman: So. Whether that's communicated to a team member, a [00:20:40] coach, a partner in life, a partner in business. I believe if I make a goal and I don't like put it out to the world or to the whatever, then how am I going to be held accountable for it? But also how am I going to manifest its reality? You know, so I look above my screen.
[00:20:57] Steve Guberman: I've got a really bad pencil drawing of a home that I [00:21:00] want to own or build in Vermont one day. And so for me, like putting it out there. Makes it a reality. And if I say, oh, I want X to happen, but I never tell anybody who's holding me accountable, how am I reverse engineering that goal into my daily activities to work towards its success?
[00:21:19] Steve Guberman: [00:21:20] So, yeah, I think a goal without like putting it out there is really useless.
[00:21:26] Corey Quinn: Yeah. It's too easy to hide.
[00:21:27] Steve Guberman: Yeah. And then, you know, to, to what I said earlier, I was. Running fully reactive, you know, I was not being proactive in order to accomplish a thing. I was being extremely reactive in, [00:21:40] you know, all of my sales and all of my marketing, in growth, in budgeting, in every aspect of running my business, because I didn't have a set of goals that said, Here's where we want to be in Q1 and in Q2 and in Q3 and beyond.
[00:21:54] Steve Guberman: So yeah, without any goals defined, there's no way to Be proactive in anything [00:22:00]
[00:22:00] Corey Quinn: as you were kind of going through this, this, this mental transformation, going from reactive to being more proactive. What changes did you see in the agency? What changed?
[00:22:10] Steve Guberman: So I, first I got a coach, I got out of my own way and realized there's so much I don't know.
[00:22:15] Steve Guberman: And this was, I think a year or two or three, I joined a mastermind group and then spent a year [00:22:20] in the mastermind group. And then I did one on one coaching. And so it gave me invaluable insight as to like what I thought I was doing right that I was not doing properly. Everything from team members that shouldn't have been there, team members that were in the wrong roles.
[00:22:38] Steve Guberman: Team members that weren't [00:22:40] fully empowered to do their jobs because I was micromanaging or something, you know, just not allowing them to do what they were hired to do no or wrong processes in place. And so when things and not the things were on fire, like the business was growing, we were doing well, but it was not nearly as good as it could have been.
[00:22:59] Steve Guberman: There was [00:23:00] very few efficiencies, very few processes for things. And once you start like. Tightening up one thing here and one thing there, massive improvements happen. I don't want to say overnight, but in a very short amount of time, and it got everybody on board with, Oh, we're going to make some changes here.
[00:23:19] Steve Guberman: How do I [00:23:20] participate in. Making things better. So it, it set a new cultural tone of things were good, but if we do these things that Steve's bringing back to the office from this coaching sessions, here's how we're going to make things better. So, you know, in a very short amount of time, things got really, really [00:23:40] optimized.
[00:23:40] Steve Guberman: I'll say,
[00:23:41] Corey Quinn: Hey, it's Corey. After scaling an agency from 20 million to 150 million. I've discovered something profound. The most successful agencies aren't trying to serve everyone. They dominate one specific vertical market. I've created the Deep Specialization Accelerator, a 90 day group [00:24:00] program that transforms generalist agencies.
[00:24:02] Corey Quinn: Into sought after vertical market specialists using the proven system from my best selling book anyone not Everyone we will help you to number one Choose the perfect vertical market for you if you don't already have one [00:24:20] number two Build trust and authority in the vertical. Number three, create a predictable revenue growth plan so you can dominate the market with certainty.
[00:24:30] Corey Quinn: Join other ambitious agency founders ready to escape the generalist trap. We start in early March and only 12 spots are available to ensure [00:24:40] you have an amazing experience. Visit coryquin. com slash DSA, that's coryquin. com slash DSA to learn more about the next cohort that's starting soon. Now back to the show.
[00:24:54] Corey Quinn: Uh, when it comes, when it comes to burnout, burnout is very, very common in this [00:25:00] industry.
[00:25:00] Yeah.
[00:25:00] Corey Quinn: I have two questions. I'll ask the first one. What are some of the early signs, the warning signs, let's call it a burnout.
[00:25:06] Steve Guberman: I've seen clients do everything from like, take it out on employees. It's really, you know, comes off in a passive aggressive way, especially in a remote environment, you know, snipping over Slack or, [00:25:20] you know, some project management tool or something like that.
[00:25:23] Steve Guberman: Taking it out on family, spinning wheels and working longer hours than are needed. I guess that's, that's probably more of a, a reason. But desperation in biz dev, I think as a result of that, the work tends to suffer. [00:25:40] Yeah. I'd say those are the two main things. The work suffers. This is the reverse order.
[00:25:44] Steve Guberman: The work suffers and the way we treat other people.
[00:25:47] Corey Quinn: Yeah. Relationships.
[00:25:47] Steve Guberman: Yeah.
[00:25:49] Corey Quinn: What can an agency owner do? To avoid burnout.
[00:25:54] Steve Guberman: I am a big fan of just get outside, put the phone away, put the computer away. I mean, whatever, if there's a [00:26:00] podcast in your ear while you're walking around the block, fine, but get outside, go for a walk, just a change of a slight shift of perspective, little fresh air.
[00:26:09] Steve Guberman: I'm a big gardener. So, you know, for me, I'll take a midday break and go out to the garden. Not this time of year, but you know, normally to me, that's a big thing. I think having a [00:26:20] creative outlet outside of the work that we do in the creative industry is super important. So whether that's, you know, painting, sculpting, pottery, whatever, creative professional, I think need to have that creative outlet.
[00:26:32] Steve Guberman: Meditation is massive in my life. Um, I know a lot of creative professionals that have a really active meditation practice, [00:26:40] helps slow or kill burnout. So I think those are good personal things, but having something as a personal outlet is vital, but burnout, like how do we prevent it in the office and in the workplace?
[00:26:55] Steve Guberman: I think it's like the big key, you know, making sure we're checking in with our team [00:27:00] members, you know, are they okay? Are they overworked? How are they doing? Asking the right leading questions, not just, are you okay? And expecting them to not just say, yeah. That
[00:27:11] Corey Quinn: sounds like my 10 year old, but yeah.
[00:27:13] Steve Guberman: Yeah. 10 year old question and answer.
[00:27:15] Steve Guberman: Time is exactly the same, but, but I think using common sense of like, [00:27:20] Oh, this deadline is highly unrealistic. Why am I expecting my developer to deliver on that time when there's no way they can do it? The amount of pressure that we're creating for them is just unnecessary. You know? So is there a systemic issue that says that I, I'm scoping work in a timeframe that's unrealistic in order to answer to clients that are [00:27:40] asking for unrealistic things.
[00:27:41] Steve Guberman: Can I put more resources in place? How am I asking my team? What do they need for me to succeed? And what does success look like in this instance? You know, so common sense things, but not also common sense things.
[00:27:58] Corey Quinn: These are very rational things [00:28:00] for business owners to do, right? And I think business owners, we are very emotional, right?
[00:28:04] Corey Quinn: We work from the gut. And I think that that goes to, for me, it goes to the importance of having a coach and having a guide who can have maybe an outside perspective, have the wisdom of being through that experience themselves and come out the other side to [00:28:20] help, help us be more grounded. So,
[00:28:22] Steve Guberman: yeah. So it's interesting because when I work with agencies with a leadership team in place, not just like, you know, these are my four or five employees, but like a true leadership team.
[00:28:33] Steve Guberman: I'll do sidebar conversations with them in a one on one and like get a barometer. And [00:28:40] I, and I'm not, you know, a specific leadership coach. I'm not a specific cultural coach, but it's important to get an understanding of where are they and how are they feeling about their boss and the teams that they run and, and what the overall cultural, cultural temperature is.
[00:28:56] Steve Guberman: And anonymize that data and bring it [00:29:00] back to anonymize where needed and bring it back to the owner who I typically work one on one with say, here's the energy that I'm getting, here's what I'm seeing. How can we, you know, do some work to make some changes here. So your PM team isn't so overstressed or your dev team has more lead time or, you know, things like that.
[00:29:17] Steve Guberman: So asking the right questions, [00:29:20] it doesn't take a lot to be human in how we work with our teams.
[00:29:24] Corey Quinn: Absolutely. I think, um, I'm just reflecting on my, one of my agency experiences, when I was on the executive team, what, what I noticed. Was that this, the founder, CEO, who's very charismatic, would not get real answers from people.
[00:29:39] Yeah. You
[00:29:39] Corey Quinn: may ask the [00:29:40] right questions, but people don't want to disappoint him. You know, they don't want to upset him. They want to, they want to, his respect and so on and so forth. So there's that whole dynamic where,
[00:29:49] yeah.
[00:29:49] Corey Quinn: It reminds me of a, of a saying, one of my, one of my mentors share with me, which is that the best CEOs surround themselves with people who will tell them the truth.
[00:29:57] Steve Guberman: Yep.
[00:29:58] Corey Quinn: You know, regardless [00:30:00] of whether or not it's going to make them feel good.
[00:30:01] Steve Guberman: But think about the dynamic there. They're surrounding themselves with people that will tell them the truth because they're giving that space for them to tell the truth. There are so many CEOs. Leadership. Yeah. There's so many CEOs that the wall is there and they don't want to hear what your problem is.
[00:30:17] Steve Guberman: Just get your job job done. Right. [00:30:20] So it starts with the top of having the open containers of, Hey, my door is actually always open and, and I want to hear from you and what challenges you have. And then creating that environment where leadership and middle management and all the way down to whoever does the, whatever is, you know, sweeping the floors or whatever [00:30:40] feels.
[00:30:40] Steve Guberman: Open enough to say, here's a challenge that I have, and I don't know how to work through it. And not having that openness is so toxic for mental health. Like we're talking about for productivity, for efficiency, for profitability, which is frankly why most people open a business in the first place, you know, [00:31:00] so it travels through all aspects of the business.
[00:31:02] Corey Quinn: Yeah. Okay. So we've talked about aligning goals. We've talked about the power of authenticity. We've talked about, yeah, how to ways to, uh, uh, avoid burnout. Let's talk about building a vision. You, you have a, a magic paintbrush project that helps agency [00:31:20] owners to create a vision for their business. Could you tell me more about that?
[00:31:24] Steve Guberman: So I did this exercise when I had my agency, gosh, yeah, 15, 17, 18 years ago. And it was something that I had never ever thought of. And sure. I had journaled before. Daydreamed as a kid, we all daydreamed, but this was an assignment that like, for the first time said, [00:31:40] if you could be, see, achieve, do anything, like let's talk about it in great detail.
[00:31:46] Steve Guberman: So it's an exercise that I take agency owners through that it's a single prompt of. Spend some time in an environment that you feel comfortable opening up in, and I've had people type [00:32:00] it out or write it out in, um, you know, on an iPad with a pen, you know, Apple pencil or an actual notebook or type it up in a Google doc.
[00:32:07] Steve Guberman: And it doesn't matter how you get the information out. But what is the vision of. In a year or three years, the business that you want, everything from the color paint on the walls to the [00:32:20] kind of clients you're working with, to the size of your team, to how much money you're making personally, how much you're paying your team, like truly get into as much detail of what this, at this point, fantasy picture is, and it's, it's a really magical opportunity to anything goes.[00:32:40]
[00:32:40] Steve Guberman: And there's no wrong answer. And there's no shame in whatever somebody might want. And they just get to be free and say, here's what I envision. And similar to asking about goals before is that if I don't communicate it to somebody, there's no way it's ever going to happen because once I see this. Magic paintbrush exercise on paper.[00:33:00]
[00:33:00] Steve Guberman: And I think it's really good to redo it every few years, like every three years or so. I had a magical hundredth episode interview with a guest on my podcast who can't say who it is here. Cause this will come out before that comes out, but they. Did this exercise with Milton Glaser [00:33:20] 20 something years ago.
[00:33:22] Steve Guberman: And, and so it was for me, like super exciting that this person who I invited to be like the hundredth episode, like a massive impact on an industry person had done this with Milton Glaser of all people. And it's an exercise that like really was. Game changing for me that I've seen [00:33:40] change the game for many agency owners as well.
[00:33:43] Steve Guberman: So you've got this picture, this magic paintbrush. How do you turn that into actual like real actionable goals? Tactics on a day to day basis and there's a lot of reverse engineering and there's a lot of breaking it down into is that reality? Is that [00:34:00] attainable? Is that something that I can actually turn into measurable actions?
[00:34:03] Steve Guberman: And then how do I break it down into art in three years? This is where I want to be. What does two years look like? What does a year look like? What is monthly and daily activities look like?
[00:34:14] Corey Quinn: Yeah. It's so powerful. I, uh, just to share, I, I read a [00:34:20] book by, uh, Dr. Benjamin Hardy talking about your future self and similar concept where.
[00:34:27] Corey Quinn: It is your, your future self writes a letter to your current self about what life is like in the future and giving, giving the present self, the future self, giving the present [00:34:40] self advice on, on how to, you know, on how they're doing and how to get there and all these great things. It's, it's great. It's something I read.
[00:34:47] Corey Quinn: almost daily. I read that future letter to myself. My future self is calling me. So it's really nice.
[00:34:53] Steve Guberman: Yeah. I've done that exercise, not in the business, but in some, some personal and spiritual work I've done where send yourself a letter. [00:35:00] So we did it in a group and we'd write ourselves a letter. We'd give it to somebody else.
[00:35:03] Steve Guberman: We'd say, in six months mail this to me. And so for me, it was out of my brain because I gave it to whatever, Bennett or somebody else. And in six months they mail it to me and I get this letter. I'm like, that, that handwriting looks familiar on the outside of the envelope. Whose horrible handwriting is that?
[00:35:17] Steve Guberman: It's mine.
[00:35:19] And I'd get
[00:35:19] Steve Guberman: this [00:35:20] letter and, you know, with, with varying prompts of what do you wish for yourself over the course of the next six months, or what do you want to release You know, over the next six months or, you know, things that you're doing that you want to stop doing or, you know, all kinds of different things, but there's great ways and great activities similar to what you're talking about, where you can [00:35:40] advise your future self or, you know, give yourself future prompts.
[00:35:43] Corey Quinn: It's beautiful.
[00:35:44] Steve Guberman: Yeah.
[00:35:45] Corey Quinn: Uh, let's move on to a topic that is, uh, very painful and practical for the world we live in, which is about delegation and growth. You've mentioned in previous interviews that owners hold on to too much. [00:36:00] Why is delegation so hard for us?
[00:36:03] Steve Guberman: I mean, the obvious, we're control freaks.
[00:36:05] Steve Guberman: Speaking personally, um, I'm not going to throw it out to too many people, but that's the reality, you know, uh, it's my business, my name's on the door. It's gotta be just right. And if it's not, who's it going to fall on? It's going to fall on me. And, you know, so I think it's a, it's [00:36:20] a very toxic mindset. It's a very limiting mindset as a business grows.
[00:36:25] Steve Guberman: The owner needs to do less of the actual execution of things and delegating that out to the people that you hire and, and trust to do what you hire them to do is the only way that you free up time to [00:36:40] set the vision, spend time, uh, communicating the goals and the vision owners are typically. The, the key salesperson for quite some time of a business.
[00:36:50] Steve Guberman: And so if you want it to grow, you've got to get the design and development and strategy and things like that off your plate, account management and trust other [00:37:00] people to do it. It's, you know, and, and, you know, I've been in. I've done it myself. I've been in experiences, uh, as an employee where the owner's micromanaging and it's like, well, nobody wants to be micromanaged.
[00:37:12] Steve Guberman: You hired me to do a job. Trust that I'm going to get it done. And then I'll report back if I can't get it done and ask for some help, or [00:37:20] I'll let you know when it is done. Go do what you need to do. Leave me alone. It's a really very limiting mindset. And it's a really easy thing to change. Simple couple of exercises of, you know, write down what you do every day for a few days.
[00:37:35] Steve Guberman: And then go back to that list and say, Oh, you know, I was in a sauna 17 [00:37:40] times today. I don't need to be there. I have a project manager. Good. Stop doing that. Like literally stop doing the thing that you shouldn't be doing.
[00:37:47] Corey Quinn: Done.
[00:37:47] Steve Guberman: You have a VA for that, or you have a project manager for that, or you, you have a copywriter.
[00:37:51] Steve Guberman: Why are you spending time writing instead of reviewing? There's, there's another more tactical way to do it, thinking about it in the sense of numbers of what's your time worth? [00:38:00] And if you're spending time doing something that is worth 30 or 40 or $50 when you could be doing something that's worth hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, seeing it in dollars and cents.
[00:38:11] Steve Guberman: Frame of mind is really a good way to motivate of let me have a VA do this or a junior designer do this production work [00:38:20] work with a really talented agency owner in Boston and That and they constantly will come back to me and say but it's easier. It's quicker for me to just do it myself And I'm like, you're probably right.
[00:38:34] Steve Guberman: Track the time of how many times you've set, you've done it yourself because it's quicker. [00:38:40] When if the first maybe one or two times you taught somebody else to do it, that's off your plate now. You never have to do it again. Then it opens you up to do the work you really want to do, the things that are really valuable for you.
[00:38:54] Corey Quinn: You mentioned briefly about that a founder or the owner is the last person to [00:39:00] hold on to sales the longest. What, what is a process? That you can, you help agencies with to get that owner out of that sales role. Like how does that, how does that actually happen?
[00:39:13] Steve Guberman: I think it's one of the trickiest things to make happen to hand that baton off successful successfully.[00:39:20]
[00:39:20] Steve Guberman: I think it starts with documenting processes. And doing that for like a year or two of, of how are, how are we getting our clients? Where are the most valuable clients from what's our messaging? How are we approaching things? How do we, how do we pitch or not pitch? How do we do our proposals? How do we price things?
[00:39:39] Steve Guberman: And like [00:39:40] building that playbook, like probably you do with a lot of your clients of what does the sales process look like here? And, and then finding the person or people that I can start part and parceling off this too. I've seen it fail more times than I've seen it succeed, bringing somebody else in and taking it off [00:40:00] the owner's plate.
[00:40:01] Steve Guberman: If you think about the way that these businesses typically start, it's, I'm at an agency, the owner sucks, I'm going to go launch my own thing and I'm going to, my first clients are my neighbor. My mom's, you know, hairdresser and my old clients and, you know, one of my old bosses. So it's all tied to, [00:40:20] it's webbed to me.
[00:40:21] Steve Guberman: And that's what my, my agency was most of my clients, you know, clients are, how do I now build relationships and forge new endeavors that have nothing to do with me? And that's where I think a sales process really starts to, you know, cook with fire. And [00:40:40] you've got a process that either goes out to the places where the, the right opportunities are.
[00:40:45] Steve Guberman: And that brings us back to half an hour ago when we're talking about niching, knowing where to be
[00:40:50] and
[00:40:50] Steve Guberman: knowing how to message things even better than that. When people seek you out because of expert level you are and what you do and in the industries you [00:41:00] do it when somebody else is fielding those inquiries and the owner doesn't need to do that.
[00:41:05] Steve Guberman: So, yeah,
[00:41:08] Corey Quinn: that's awesome. You said that the processes are scalable. People are not.
[00:41:14] Steve Guberman: Yeah.
[00:41:14] Corey Quinn: Can you allow, can you elaborate on that?
[00:41:16] Steve Guberman: Yeah. I mean, we [00:41:20] can only give so much work to somebody, right. And so there's a finite amount of. Let's call it six billable hours in a day, eight or nine actual hours in a day, seven billable hours, whatever you want to, however you want to slice it up.
[00:41:33] Steve Guberman: That there's a finite amount of time that I can do something, but if I can systematize it and now with automation and [00:41:40] AI, I can optimize what that time and how it's, how it's executed. The beauty is I can plug in two people to a system, three people to a system. And they can spread the work out amongst them.
[00:41:52] Steve Guberman: Or if whatever, Susan wins the lottery and doesn't show up tomorrow. I have a system in, I like to use that instead of saying hit the, got hit by a bus.
[00:41:59] Corey Quinn: [00:42:00] Ah, it's much, much more elegant. I like that.
[00:42:02] Steve Guberman: I have a process that I can hire somebody and say, Hey, Susan's off in, you know, Montego Bay. Can you come and jump in where they left off?
[00:42:12] Steve Guberman: And I've got this system outlined of step 5, you know, if this, then that get this done. So, you know, I'm a big fan of [00:42:20] documentation and to me, that's what I mean by systems are scalable is it's got to be documented. I don't care if it's in a Google doc, if it's in Notion, Asana. You know, we used for years, a WordPress theme that was a wiki theme.
[00:42:34] Steve Guberman: I still have it like as an archive on my desktop. It's the fifth room creative Bible. [00:42:40] I've helped agencies set those kinds of processes up where this is where we document things. And this is how we onboard a client. This is how we qualify or disqualify a potential client. This is where our handbook is and what's in our handbook for employees.
[00:42:53] Steve Guberman: And so documentation for systems are essential for scalability. Yeah, [00:43:00] I think it's, people are just not scalable. We are so finite. It's sad.
[00:43:04] Corey Quinn: Well, you said the, uh, the, the, the word of the hour, which is AI.
[00:43:08] Steve Guberman: Yeah.
[00:43:08] Corey Quinn: How do you see AI impacting the, the, the aid, the business of being an agency over the next couple of years?
[00:43:17] Steve Guberman: I think it's almost irresponsible to look out that [00:43:20] far out years cause man, it's happening at break speed, but we'll say 2025, maybe into 2026, what we saw last year was agencies that were afraid to embrace AI. They're likely not in business or they won't be in business for very long. And so being scared that AI is going to take a job or [00:43:40] replace an agency, I think is fear based.
[00:43:42] Steve Guberman: And I think that if we want to be successful and leverage AI, then that's. Well, let me re say that, not say in a different way, if we want to be successful with AI as it exists, then we need to embrace it and we can't ignore it. I don't think [00:44:00] that, and I haven't really seen this happen yet, that an agency is going to be completely replaced by AI.
[00:44:07] Steve Guberman: I haven't seen a company say, you know, we can do that all ourselves with AI, get rid of the agency that we pay X amount of dollars. Like I haven't seen that I've seen certain components get taken away. But [00:44:20] I think agencies need to embrace the tools. They need to figure out ways to leverage it for efficiencies.
[00:44:25] Steve Guberman: And those efficiencies can lead to greater margins, less people. So how do we, you know, to your point earlier, we don't need a thousand people. How can we do more with less people? Well, here's an opportunity to do that.
[00:44:38] There you go. Yeah, there you go.
[00:44:39] Steve Guberman: [00:44:40] Yeah. And man, the, the power of what you can make these things do is crazy.
[00:44:45] Corey Quinn: Well, given the fact that you have a design background, I'm assuming that's obviously visual design. What are you excited about for AI as relates to visual design?
[00:44:53] Steve Guberman: Honestly, I have not used it very much for that. I have some clients that have done some concepting in like mid journey and a couple of [00:45:00] the other visual tools.
[00:45:01] Steve Guberman: I've been very unsuccessful with that. And so I really just use it for automation, helping me with writing, not writing for me, but helping me with writing, but I've seen some of my clients do amazing visual. Conceptualizations, 3D animations, just brilliant, [00:45:20] brilliant stuff. And they'll use, they'll do it as this is our concept.
[00:45:24] Steve Guberman: We're not going to spend a ton of time doing actual design for the concept, but once this is approved, we're going to spend the time designing it properly, full fidelity, et cetera. So again, it's, it's, you know, a proof of concept tool. It's a rapid, quick, uh, what do they call rapid [00:45:40] prototyping tool. But yeah, that stuff is amazing.
[00:45:42] Steve Guberman: I've also seen it for like coding, blow the doors off of coding. And I think it was the CEO of NVIDIA, like last week at CES or two weeks ago at CES say that like programmers developers are like gone. Like that's a scary thing for me. That's a very scary thing and I think that's a [00:46:00] very real thing very quickly that teams will be replacing developers with AI components.
[00:46:07] Corey Quinn: Yep.
[00:46:07] Steve Guberman: So that, that's, yeah, that's a, that's a component that's scary.
[00:46:11] Corey Quinn: It's going to be interesting nonetheless.
[00:46:13] Steve Guberman: So
[00:46:15] Corey Quinn: I've got two, two final questions for you as we wrap up here. What would be your [00:46:20] parting advice, particularly for an agency owners who are struggling with.
[00:46:30] Steve Guberman: I'd probably first ask, why do they want to scale up?
[00:46:33] Corey Quinn: What's
[00:46:34] Steve Guberman: their motivation there? I thought
[00:46:35] Corey Quinn: you would ask that.
[00:46:35] Steve Guberman: Yeah. I think scaling again is one of those things where it's like, if [00:46:40] I'm not scaling, I'm dying. And I think it's harder, almost harder to intentionally stay nimble and small and right sized.
[00:46:47] Yeah.
[00:46:48] Steve Guberman: But what, you know, what's the hold back from the scale, right? If I want, if I'm at 2 million and I want to hit five or 10 or 20 million, you know, what's the hold back. There's obviously systems that are not in place for lead development [00:47:00] and building a funnel and building a pipeline, but start with why and why do you want to get there?
[00:47:05] Steve Guberman: And then let's figure out the how.
[00:47:07] Corey Quinn: I love it. And you mentioned this in your answer just now, but I'm curious, what is your motivation?
[00:47:13] Steve Guberman: Oh man. Honestly, I want to fish and snowboard as much as I can, third to that, [00:47:20] no. So I, I have a very strong calling to be of service and that is a calling that I, Listened very, very intimately to five years ago when I launched Outsight.
[00:47:31] Steve Guberman: And then I want to help business owners specifically in the creative industry. Cause that's the expertise area that I have [00:47:40] live better lives, run better businesses because it it's a called a trickle down or a butterfly effect or a ripple effect that if I can help an owner. Build a business that is operating more, this is the worst grammar ever.
[00:47:56] Steve Guberman: Don't shoot me. More optimally, their team [00:48:00] has a better life. Their family has a better life. Their team's family has a better life. Their clients get better work out of them. Therefore, their clients succeed and have better life. And so, listen, it is, It's a far stretch from curing cancer and putting out forest fires, but it's what I know.
[00:48:19] Steve Guberman: And so if I can be [00:48:20] of service in delivering what I know to help people run better businesses and have better lives, I want to be of service in that, in that way, you know, I believe in living a life of service in and out of work. And so I do a lot of give back in my community. This is [00:48:40] my desire to give back in the, in the professional world.
[00:48:43] Corey Quinn: Well, you've been very generous giving back to myself as well as the audience. Thank you so much, Steve, for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom, your expertise, and your perspectives. I've, I've learned a lot. I've got a ton of notes here, so thank you so much. Where can [00:49:00] people. Learn more about you, learn more about Agency Outsight, your programs, and how you, how you potentially help them.
[00:49:08] Steve Guberman: Agencyoutsight. com is the website. Hit me up on LinkedIn. You can just search Agency Coach and I happen to have that handle on LinkedIn. My podcast is called Agency Bites. It is on all the [00:49:20] platforms. So yeah.
[00:49:21] Corey Quinn: Beautiful.
[00:49:22] Steve Guberman: Thank you so much. Thanks for coming on, Steve. Thanks for having me, Corey. This was awesome.
[00:49:25] Steve Guberman: Love, love spending time with you and, uh, happy to help however I can.
[00:49:28] Corey Quinn: Thanks for tuning in to the deep specialization podcast. If you haven't checked out my bestselling book, anyone, not everyone, you can download the audio book for free right now by going to anyone, [00:49:40] not everyone. com. That's anyone, not everyone.
[00:49:44] Corey Quinn: com. And finally, a special thank you to our sponsor E2M. We'll see you in the next episode.
