Transcript
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Hey everyone, logan with sweet fish
here. As you may already know,
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we've had the HASHTAG agency series running
for a while now here on bb growth.
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Over the next several weeks you'll be
able to listen in to select episodes
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of the Innovative Agency, hosted by
Sharon Tork as she leads conversations with agency
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leaders about how their teams are staying
on the cutting edge of marketing trends,
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how they're adapting their businesses to meet
new challenges and a whole lot more.
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All right, let's get into the
episode. Welcome everybody back to another episode
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of the Innovative Agency. Share and
tork here with you again today and it's
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great to be with everybody. As
I'm sitting here now, we've just blown
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through the two thousand and nineteen holidays
and we're all in the mindset of New
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Year, fresh starts, and so
I'm so excited to be back at it
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and we've got some great conversations coming
up for you over the next group of
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episodes, including today's, and I'm
very excited to talk with today's guests all
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about the topic of values based businesses, and I know that that's a term
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that it's very easy to throw around
and also to misinterpret. But when you
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find a business, in this case
an agency, that is walking that talk,
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I think it's really worth conversation,
and so I'm really thrilled to welcome
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to the show today been hern.
Ben is a CO founder of medfish digital,
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which is an agency headquartered on the
West Coast, important area, Oregon.
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And Ben, I'm really excited to
have you on the show today and
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I have this conversation. So thank
you so much for joining me. Thank
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you for having me on. Yeah, I'm I am. I'm definitely looking
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forward to getting into this whole topic
of how you run your agency and how
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you help the clients run their business
as, I guess, based on this
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whole promise of culture and values and
how they filter through what you say and
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what you do. And so tell
me, tell us a little bit about
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so how did you how what's the
origin story of medfish digital and what's your
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background as an entrepreneur? Yeah,
so the company was founded in two thousand
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and six. Officially, prior to
that I had been I had a career
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and market research and a lot of
Zeros and one working with data. So
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and the Internet was kind of in
its early stages and I was recognizing that
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and it was kind of cool and
I was into it and so kind of
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on the side, I would build
websites and then work to get them to
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rank. And I was about two
thousand and three and I knew I wanted
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to build a business one day and
at least trying entrepreneurship on my own,
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and so the Internet marketing kind of
seemed like a good way to get started
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with that because at the time I
really felt that a lot of businesses could
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benefit. Yeah, so kind of
took the plunge, left my job,
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which is a little scary, in
two thousand and six and started. You
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know, we started, we had
a couple of clients and gradually built over
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time. And it's funny because Corey, who we were dating at the time
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and now I'm fortunate enough to be
married to her, had convinced me to
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quit my job and I knew that
it was the right move because, doing
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it right, I could always maybe
go back if things didn't work out,
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and she had, she was very
supportive and and had a lot of faith
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in me that we could kind of
do something on our own. And then
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about a year later, I convinced
her to quit her job and we kind
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of carved out two separate areas of
the business that we co founded and have
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grown it over time. Yeah,
I know, and I know we were
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chatting briefly earlier about about the whole
dynamic of running a business with your life
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partner, and I'm I'm always impressed
and in awe of couples who do it
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successfully and so and most of them
who do have told me something similar to
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what you just said, which is
that you sort of pick. They tend
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to have two rules about it,
that you pick your lanes and you stand
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in those lanes and the company and
then you do you bust to try to
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leave as much of the business behind
when you leave the business to go home
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and have the rest of your life. It's I think it's harder to do
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the second than the first, from
what I hear, but that's sort of
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the common wisdom that my clients relate
to me. It is and it's always
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fascinating because as business owners we tend
to think a good way. That somebody
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put it to me as we tend
to be biological pl statements. Sometimes that's
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true. It's there's a lot of
work that we have to do. I
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think we had to do more upfront
of learning to kind of to work,
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to leave some of the business items
behind or not let that stress carry into
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the household. It's not always perfect, but when we're raising a family together
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it is not. You know,
we try and there's a lot of work
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stuff. That's great, and there's
a lot of challenges when you're building a
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business and yeah, the relationship would
suffer a few brought that all together and
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you know, our identities do get
a little entrenched in the businesses that were
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part of. I think just as
human beings and entrepreneurs we're so yeah,
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so it's always a challenge, it's
always a work in progress but yeah,
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knock on wood, we've we're I
don't know, we're doing it and we
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enjoy it and you know, it's
I wouldn't want to be on that journey
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with anybody else. So well,
that's great. Well, yeah, I
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think there's something about the DNA of
an entrepreneur in general that makes it hard
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to shut it off. It's just
sort of part of how you're hardwired and
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it's also, you know, we're
living in and always on world and so,
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even if they're not in business,
with your life partner. It's are
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hard to turn it off just if
you're not within normal working hours or sitting
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in a physical workspace. And so
many of us our work as mobile anyway,
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so we're always thinking about it.
It's in some way, shape or
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form. You seem like the type
of entrepreneur or business owner and we're not
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well acquainted, but we've had a
conversation and I've done spent quite a bit
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of time sort of looking at the
work that that madfish does and and and
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at your website to see sort of
what's your culture and philosophy is and it
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you seem like the type of agency
that it seems like you've left a lot
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of your own DNA in terms of
values and culture in the way you've built
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the company, and I wanted to
talk a little bit about that because I
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think it's think culture is a very
buzzword, e type things say. I
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think people love to say that it
eats strategy for breakfast. I think people
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love to talk about why it's important
for talent attention in our retention and attraction
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and all that stuff, but I
think it's something that's easier to talk about
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in snippets than it is to truly
commit to building a business around and that
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seems to be what you're doing over
at madfish, including deciding to really become
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a social enterprise by electing to be
a Bee Corp about a year and a
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half ago. Right, yeah,
Yep, that's exactly right. So tell
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let's talk a little bit about that. What, how? How have you?
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How did you start, first of
all, building really such a strong
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values and culture based agency, and
what led to the decision that being a
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B Corp was right for you?
First of all, let's explain for the
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benefit of anybody listening who might not
be exposed to be corpse. What is
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it be Corp exactly? What is
it? What does it mean to be
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a Big Corp? Yeah, so
companies that have been certified as a Bee
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Corp are, you know, their
benchmarked and there's a group that you take
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an assessment. It's actually quite difficult
to qualify, but it proves that you
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meet the highest standards of the business, meets the higher standards of social and
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environmental performance, public transparency, even
legal accountability, and all to balance profit
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and purpose kind of in the the
world around us. And so you know,
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it's it's a lot of it's a
big culture shift and it's a lot
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of things that I don't know.
There's a lot of businesses that are doing
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some but going through the Be Corp
certification kind of forces you to, you
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know, look in word, document
the things that you're doing that are working
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well and expand on them to really
take it to the next level. And
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what led you to want to pursue
sort of that mark of excellence or that
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what? Why was it important to
you as an agency owner that you run
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the business? Basically, I think
I'll I think of be certification. We
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are our firm has one or two
clients who are be certified, and I
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think of it as sort of a
public expression of an agency's excellence in terms
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of social awareness, sustainability, commitment, things like that. But every agency
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owner has, I think, a
different reason probably for pursuing it. What
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what were your reasons? What were
the reasons of the agency for feeling like
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that was important to it? Yeah, that's a good question. So,
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you know, it's I think early
on when I worked for an incorporate Gig,
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that was great experience, a great
career. There were different things that,
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you know, as an employee,
I thought one day, if I
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start my own business, I would
do this differently, I do that differently,
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and it's really easy to kind of
have those ideas, I think everybody.
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Everybody does. But a lot of
it kind of carried over as we
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started growing our company and I thought, you know, people should know our
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ethics in the marketing world, and
so I one of the first pages we
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actually added to our website when we
started out was our code of ethics,
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and so it was always super important, I felt, because almost every person
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that I spoke with said, Hey, I went to your website and I
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read your code ethics. I really
didn't think too many people would read it.
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I just kind of thought, okay, websites and expression of our business.
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What should people know about us?
We have offered these services, but
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also this is who you'd be working
with, somebody or a group of people
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that care about these things. So
we started there early on and then we
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always kind of had it, like
you mentioned, in our in our DNA,
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I felt of wanting to do good
and as our platform grew we're able
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to kind of to to do more
good in the in the world and community
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around us, and so there's always
just been this drive of we want to
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want to operate in the world as
we want it to be, not always
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as it is, if that makes
sense, and so not in a not
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in, you know, a pie
in the sky or a dreamy kind of
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way, or even a false way. We want to operate in a world
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that we can help make better.
We want to make things better, we
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want to make our interactions, we
want to our excuse me, we want
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our interactions to lead to things being
better. So everything we touch, everything
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we work on, we want to
be better afterwards, and so that was
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kind of the the underlying kind of
core at which kind of drove us to
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go for the initial be corps certification. There's a lot of benefits that we
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had put in place for employees over
the years before that that we're heading in
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that direction of, you know,
just making time and space for people,
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both on the mental health side as
well as physical health side, in addition
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to the work that we do.
So being a bee corps seemed like a
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natural kind of next step. But
it was definitely a challenge to get our
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certification. It wasn't as easy as
to taking the assessment and getting it.
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It took us about a year of
work to really get all the things in
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place from both a compliant standpoint and, you know, benefits, documentation processes,
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things like that. We had to
get all that in place to to
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get certified. So it is quite
difficult but it was well worth it.
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So I wanted to ask you because
one of the things that struck me as
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I was looking at the blog content
on your site over the last probably eighteen
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months or maybe a little bit more, and how it's evolved over the last
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year. And this is an outsider's
perspective and maybe I'm going to surprise you
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with this question, but it's really
clear to me that it's kind of evolved
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over the last year or so to
be very culture focused. There are a
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lot of content, they're generated by
your team on employee engagement. A lot
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of content there, I'm being values
based as a business. Just do you
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feel like as one of these,
the chicken or the egg, is sort
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of the pursuing this be certification and
being of so a more socially perceived as
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a more socially conscious agency? Did
that sort of lead to the cultural changes
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that that are reflected in that content? Or is it the other where you
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finally wanted to sort of make a
public statement about the fact that this was
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this is what your priority was as
an agency and you wanted your clients to
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understand that better. So the certification
was helpful. Yeah, you know,
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it's interesting you pointed that out at
you know, I feel like it's a
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natural evolution of kind of the voice
of the business and one of the things
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that we kind of identified a couple
years back was that our voice was maybe
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more on the technical side of marketing
and we were doing a lot more blog
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posts and writing and putting articles out
in the community that were maybe focused on
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helping somebody to increase the return on
adspend or design focus work that converts better
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than another, you know, things
like that. And so as we started
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talking about well, you know,
there's a lot of this out there.
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Will still continue to do that,
but what do we what do we want
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the blog to to really express who
we are and more to give clients both
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something to understand of who you would
be working with in our company, and
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so we wanted to use our blog
is kind of a platform for the people
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that work here to talk about things
that they're they're excited about, and often
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times that's more than just the latest
marketing tactics, you know, and so
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culture and engagement is definitely something that
we're all we're all into because it makes
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us by talking about it, by
looking at what other companies are doing,
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by sharing the ideas, it helps
us all to be better and we get
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a lot from learning from other companies
what they're doing and bring that inward.
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And so we wanted to kind of
return that and just talk about what what
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it is. Yeah, that that
we're excited about on that side. And
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so, yeah, employee engagement is
definitely I mean we measure that. We
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want to make sure that we're living
our values more than just talking about it.
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Yeah, well, and if it
is clear, and and I do
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agree with you that it did look
evolutionary. I mean if you look at
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the timeline of sort of the focus
of the content that your team members have
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put up there on the blog,
it definitely there's definitely a shift and it
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just seemed to sort of align with
your decision to seek the be certification and
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kind of feels like it was all
happening sort of simultaneously, which I think
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is a great thing. It means
you're definitely putting your money where your mouth
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is as a business owner and building
something that your team is going to feel
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invested in. So, for the
benefit of maybe my more cynical listeners here
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who own agents these let's talk a
little bit about it's it is it's a
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great achievement to have a business that
is an alignment with sort of the values
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and the mission and the vision of
the owners, but also the people who
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who work there every day. But
how is this translated for you in the
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market? How is it translated for
the agency? See in terms of talent
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retention and attraction and in terms of
new business retention and attraction of the types
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of clients that you've been able to
work with. Let's talk a little bit
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about sort of the business and number
side of culture and what sort of a
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trend you've noticed there. Yeah,
you know, it's it's interesting because we
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we do look at that as much
as we can and where we can,
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and I mean I think we've got
great retention on the employee side and I
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think we've got great attention on the
client side. We have a we just
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did an NPS survey amongst our clients
and it came in, I want to
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say it came in and like eighty
three or eighty seven even might have data.
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So it's really high. So on
that side we have very happy,
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excited, engaged clients. On the
employee side, very similar. We didn't
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have a you know, in comparison
over the years we've never had, knock
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on wood, a retention issue.
We've always kind of put people first and
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clients first, and so I think
there might be if I had to look
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at it from other agencies that I'm
familiar with, and even there there's several
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of us that share a lot of
really intimate data to kind of on the
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number side, to understand market trends
in the industry as a whole, and
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I think we probably take, you
know, a hit maybe on maybe a
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few percentage points of profit, but
it's it makes I mean, if that's
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the cost for creating a better workplace
and a better client experience, than we're
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all for it because without those two
things we don't have a business. So
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yeah, yeah, you know,
it's it's interesting. There is it's not
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cheap, but I you know,
I think it different. It's not cheap
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when you're larger as as a business. I think starting off as a freelancer
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and then having a company with two
to three folks I mean an agency that
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size, there's definitely there's a different
set of challenges. They're still challenges,
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but having engaged team members that can
help keep us, you know, that
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can help drive the be corp initiatives, because it's not just it's not I
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can't take too much credit for the
be corps movement that that occurs in our
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company. We I'm one of the
people, you know, Corey and I
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looked at it and came to the
team and said this is something we believe
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in. What do you guys think? And that, you know, all
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of us together implemented it over the
years and so yeah, so it's tough
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to say that it it's got,
you know, impact one way or another,
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because things were good before, things
continue to be well. It's just,
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yeah, we could quantify it maybe
a little bit more, and so
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we put out like a social impact
report and and things like that on our
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website, on our blog to kind
of be transparent of this is how is
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the impact that we made and it's
a big byproduct of the Be Corp work
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that we do. Yeah, I
noticed that it has its change sort of
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the complexion of the types of new
potential clients that the agency is targeting or
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prospecting for. It makes us,
if I think it forces us, to
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put it through a tougher Lens.
You know, over the years we have
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to be we definitely talked about potential
clients differently, I think, in the
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last few years because we want to
be said, you know, we do
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this be corps. You know certification. We have to get recertified from time
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to time. We want to be
conscious of that. So, you know,
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we've got a steady group of you
know, the phone rings, email
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Dings, people are reaching out to
us. We follow our own best practices
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from marketing and yeah, we do
have to be a little bit more discerning
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about certain client types and industries and
just we do pay attention to global sustainability
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as and a big one of what
impact that client is having in their community.
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So yeah, so it does.
It changes the conversation a little bit,
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but it hasn't, I would say, over the last three years it's
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maybe disqualified to leads for, you
know, sustainability practices or things like that,
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or just groups that we wouldn't want
to companies or corporations we wouldn't want
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to align with. But you know, we were up front with them about
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it and it was, it was, it was okay. So, yeah,
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you know it has that impact,
but it hasn't been huge, I
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would say. Hasn't like reshaped the
business or had this big hit to revenue.
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Our revenue grown every year since we
started. So knock one would we've
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been fortunate there. And you know, it's I feel like the Be Corp
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work that we do just contribute to
that momentum and and, like I said,
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growing the platform and allowing us to
use it for good. Right.
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Well, I also and I'm this
is a speculation on my part, but
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I'm guessing that your agency was already
pretty already had pretty significant standards around the
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companies it wanted to do business with
in the first place because of your focus
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on impact and values, and so
probably not as much has changed in terms
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of the ideal profile or Avatar of
a client that you're looking for. I
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mean that's in change just because you
became a B Corp. It just it
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just is a your more publicly expressive
about the fact that that's a that's your
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motivating factor for being a business,
your social impact. But you were looking
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for those kinds of clients most likely, and this is guessing on my part,
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before you became a big Corp.
You're exactly right. You're exactly right.
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How did you handle the project of
going through the process? Did you
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put a team of like a hot
team on it? Did you have specific
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individuals leading it up like a project
or the client work, or how did
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you go about? And the reason
I'm asking this is a lot of times
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I equate this to pursuing some sort
of innovation and an agency. A lot
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of times an Asian see has an
idea or a project they want to do
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that is for the purpose of moving
the agency itself forward and some specific way.
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It's not related to any specific client
and they struggle, particularly the smaller
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ones, with how they're going to
advance that. How are they're going to
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carve out space from serving their clients
Daytoday, without damaging their margins or meeting
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all the deadlines they have to meet
to actually get this initiative mood forward?
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So how did you go about logistically
sort of getting just the work done associated
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with going through the application process to
be certified? Yeah, absolutely so.
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The Eth of Corey and I learned
about kind of the BECORP movement when it
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was when it was getting started from
fellow entrepreneur friends and I'm part of a
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group called Yo entrepreneurs organization, and
so there's a lot of experience sharing and
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ideas that get kind of shared throughout
the Yeo community. And close friend had
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recently gotten BECORP certification and was explaining
to me about it and I got really
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excited because I like, this is
super cool and we need to be doing
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this and we do so many things
already. I mean this seems like it
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compliments and can kind of you know, it wouldn't be a far stretch for
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us to go for the certification.
And so cory and I came back to
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the team and we talked to a
couple of people. One primarily, who
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the person I was probably most into
it on our team, was gelt waters,
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and she's actually our associate director of
content strategy and social impact, and
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so it was something that she would
believed heavily in as well, and she
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so giesel led the initiative on our
end, but then work with other team
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team members to implement a lot of
the work, because you can't you can't
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do it all yourself and the assessment
that they put you through is pretty heavy,
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and so there's a lot of work
that goes into that. So it
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started with a couple of us,
I would say, and then I would
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say the majority of the team is
on board and involved in some way,
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shape or form. WE DO DIFFERENT
BE CORP events. We give time to
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the beat Corp. Will we do
design work for what? Do Your costume
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made? The there's a big event
that happened for be Corp last summer and
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so we donated time on the marketing
side and on the design side, and
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so that was multiple team members there. We have team members that then go
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to the retreats and speak sometimes,
and so ever, I would say,
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yeah, everybody's on board and involved
in some way, shape or form at
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this point. But to start logistically
it was really getting, you know,
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having a champion appointed on our end
in the business, because for just Coryer,
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I try and drive it. It
probably wouldn't have. We might have
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been able to get over a couple
of the obstacles, but it really takes
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team involvement, takes multiple people to
see it through. You treat it like
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you would treat a client initiative or
project, like tracking bout charts in terms
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of progress. And when you were
pursuing the certification I know you've done all
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these things since you've been certified to
get more involved in the big court movement,
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but when you were going through the
yeah, Oh, yeah, I'm
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going to say. Oh, we
treat a very similarly to that, not
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maybe as technical or as heavy as
we would a client. We so we
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actually have for ourselves we like we
would for any client. We have mad
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fish as a client internally and so
there's people, there's client strategists, who
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works on the mad fish account,
there's the different team members for the different
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initiatives were running, and so now
we do actually run it that way.
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It's funny. But yeah, leading
up to that it was more of just
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weekly check INS. We kind of
set goals and milestones, but it wasn't
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as rigorous. As you know.
There's probably one or two deadlines that did
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get pushed in all honesty, just
in the lieu of client work or right,
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yeah, getting other things done.
So what's your advice to agency owners
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or leaders who might be listening to
this who want to take steps towards having
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their agencies do more values, reflective
or we want to take those some of
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those first initiatives on employee engagement or
meaningful steps towards agency culture. What's a
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good starting point? I mean you've
you've worked on all these things as an
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agency owner and had team members work
on some of them. To where's the
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first what's some of the low hanging
fruit? Yeah, so, you know,
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I would say if you're interested in
be corps certification, be corporation dotnet
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website is a great first place to
kind of start and get more information.
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It's super indepth and I believe there's
an assessment on there that you can take
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two kind of just benchmark yourself.
You can also sign up to get more
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information and talk to somebody, but
you can learn a little bit about a
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little bit more about what it takes
and because it's doable. It seems daunting,
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but it's it ad just to to
all different industries. So whether you're
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in manufacturing or an agency or what
have you, you could still you know,
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there's the ability to get to become
a certified be corps and my advice
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would be that so many of us
say that were a purpose driven business and
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you know we say it and said
it as well. The be sort of
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gives me the be corporation certification will
prove it. So it's kind of like
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it. It backs up the things
you say and put some metrics to it,
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and it also helps to keep you
accountable because you've got to get recertified.
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So we say we're all doing these
things and that were we volunteer and
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we help the community and we use
our platform for good. So prove it.
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Yeah, well, that's that's created
advice. And if you're not sort
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of if an agency knows it's not
ready to go down that path yet,
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what's the best first place to start
getting your house in order into what are
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some good stuff that's to take?
Talk about them for engagement. What are
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some of the first easiest steps to
start looking at that as an agency yet,
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you know, I think that the
first easiest thing to do, regardless
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of your sizes, look in word
and be selfcritical at at all times,
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whether I mean whether it's an employee
who leaves the company. You know,
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think about it on the perspective as
what it you know, what impacts?
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What could you know? Did I
have as the a one of the founders?
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You know, is there a cultural
component to the business that needs to
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be adjusted or changed? Just always
be honest and self critical. I think
381
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with yourself would be the first,
first place to start. Then the next
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place to start is, yeah,
I would, I would stuff. I
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would look at what you want your
platform to be as it grows, because
384
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it's harder to maybe see or think
about that in the early stages, but
385
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it's it's easy to live those values
and look at the core values you've set
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as a company. If you haven't
set them, take those those steps to
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set core values. There's a great
book called Scaling Up and by Verne Harness.
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It's from the gazelles group and that's
that's something that we're big, you
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know, proponents of. It's something
we use in our business and so it
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used to be called the Rock Feller
Habits and then it involved in the scaling
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up years ago, and so that's
scaling up book will help you set core
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values and really get alignment on the
team in terms of mission, vision and
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value. Those are great places to
start and then be core work and other
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work that you can do around you
in the business community. I feel like
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I'll stem from those. Those things
in one of our core values is accountability
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being genuine as another one, and
so you know, we want to hold
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ourselves accountable to, basically to what
we're saying and what we're talking about,
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and so the be Corp certifications a
big component of that. And so if,
399
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again, if you're just starting off
and you're looking for a place to
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start, I would always start with
core values and then look around you to
401
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see what you can do to truly
live those core values. And going back
402
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to your question about measuring and things
you can do internally, one of a
403
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really cool tool that's out there.
There's a lot of different they of competitors,
404
00:29:41.029 --> 00:29:44.430
so you can research and see if
there's a different price point or something.
405
00:29:44.549 --> 00:29:48.069
But office vibecom is a really great
tool that we've been using for years
406
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and it's a way that you can
measure employee engagement and it's anonymous, so
407
00:29:52.779 --> 00:29:56.579
team members get a little survey every
it's like ten questions that they can just
408
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click in their email once every two
weeks. So you can set the interval,
409
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I believe, and we get such
invaluable feedback from from those tools,
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00:30:04.819 --> 00:30:10.569
from to really understand and really back
up how we're living our values, both
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00:30:10.730 --> 00:30:14.890
from a mental health perspective, from
our workload perspective, from, you know,
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everything. From would you recommend working
at mad fist digital to do we
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00:30:18.049 --> 00:30:22.279
need more sex in the break room
or whatever it is. There's some heavy
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00:30:22.319 --> 00:30:26.279
stuff, there's some light stuff,
but it's invaluable. It really does a
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00:30:26.319 --> 00:30:29.960
great job. The tool that's a
great job of quantifying we call emps,
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00:30:30.039 --> 00:30:33.319
or they we stole that from them, because your employee net promoter score.
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00:30:33.359 --> 00:30:37.390
So it's a great way to quantify
your employee engagement and you can see it
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00:30:37.470 --> 00:30:41.470
go up and down throughout the year
and you know that gives great, great
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indicators as to you know areas you
might need to address in the business that
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00:30:45.069 --> 00:30:49.299
you might not always have visibility,
especially like one of the founders. It
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00:30:49.380 --> 00:30:52.660
can be difficult and so whether you
have three people or one person, you
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00:30:52.740 --> 00:30:59.460
know it's there's so much information we
get from that type of anonymous reporting internally
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that is helpful that we can use
to implement in the business to make it
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00:31:03.140 --> 00:31:06.930
better that we wouldn't have gotten.
Nobody's going to come sit down and tell
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00:31:06.970 --> 00:31:11.490
me certain things about the workload or
stress they might be having, but it's
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00:31:11.529 --> 00:31:15.009
easy for people to anonymously kind of
give it a score from one to ten,
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00:31:15.089 --> 00:31:19.000
and we use that data heavily and
I recommend anybody else that is interested
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00:31:19.039 --> 00:31:23.839
in making their workplace better and truly
living the the core values that they set
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00:31:23.880 --> 00:31:27.200
out as their company internally. It's
the great tool to measure that. So
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00:31:27.799 --> 00:31:33.430
awesome. So you should office vibe
via Beecom, right, correct? Yep,
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00:31:33.710 --> 00:31:36.430
yeah, and I think there's tiny
pulses, another one that's out there.
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00:31:36.470 --> 00:31:38.069
I've heard of. I'm not used
it, but there's, I think,
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00:31:38.150 --> 00:31:41.029
several, but officebibe is the one
that we use and we love it.
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00:31:41.549 --> 00:31:45.349
Okay. Well, it's great trip. Well. Well, I want
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00:31:45.430 --> 00:31:51.059
to take a minute to for sell. Thank you for sharing your experiences with
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00:31:51.900 --> 00:31:57.380
our audience about building an agency based
on values and and how paying attention to
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00:31:57.579 --> 00:32:02.930
culture pays dividends, and it also
your experience going through the Be Corp certification
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00:32:04.049 --> 00:32:08.250
process. I'd really love to give
people an opportunity to learn more about the
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00:32:08.369 --> 00:32:15.960
agency and also encourage everybody to look
at bad fish's community impact report, which
440
00:32:15.119 --> 00:32:20.519
is a really good stapshot of how
they've sort of translated all this work into
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00:32:20.599 --> 00:32:23.599
action in their in their community and
with their clients. So what are the
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00:32:23.640 --> 00:32:30.710
best places for people to reach out
and learn more about that? Ben Yeah,
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00:32:30.710 --> 00:32:32.470
absolutely so. Our website is a
great place to start. Just mad
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00:32:32.589 --> 00:32:38.630
fish digitalcom and there's a link to
our blog and the top right navigation and
445
00:32:39.269 --> 00:32:44.460
there we post a lot of the
the stuff that we're doing. So impact
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00:32:44.539 --> 00:32:46.619
report is there. We also talk
about reporting tools that we used to stay
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00:32:46.619 --> 00:32:50.980
accountable as an agency. Yeah,
there's a ton of information there. We
448
00:32:51.019 --> 00:32:53.220
also have updates on some of the
be Corp Events and things like that that
449
00:32:53.380 --> 00:32:59.369
are happening. So yeah, it's
I would I would start there and if
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00:32:59.410 --> 00:33:02.970
they have questions we've got a contact
form phone numbers on the website. We
451
00:33:04.049 --> 00:33:07.490
also are on all the social media
channels, so facebook, instagram, linkedin.
452
00:33:07.849 --> 00:33:13.880
Definitely reach out on the website,
our social and we've got team members
453
00:33:14.599 --> 00:33:19.599
watching and ready to respond if anybody
had question. So awesome. Well,
454
00:33:19.880 --> 00:33:22.440
Ben Herman, thank you so much
for joining me today on the podcast.
455
00:33:22.559 --> 00:33:29.549
Really enjoyed the conversation and appreciate you
sharing your experiences with me and with our
456
00:33:29.549 --> 00:33:31.710
audience. So thank you for being
with us today. Thank you, Sharon,
457
00:33:31.750 --> 00:33:37.029
I appreciate it and thank you for
having me. We really hope you
458
00:33:37.109 --> 00:33:42.660
enjoyed this episode in the Hashtag Agency
series from the innovative agency. To hear
459
00:33:42.859 --> 00:33:46.420
more episodes along these lines, check
out the innovative agency in Apple Podcast,
460
00:33:46.700 --> 00:33:51.980
your favorite podcast player or the links
right in the show notes for this episode.
461
00:33:52.259 --> 00:33:58.009
As always, thank you so much
for listening. Gary v says it
462
00:33:58.289 --> 00:34:02.009
all the time and we agree.
Every company should think of themselves as a
463
00:34:02.130 --> 00:34:07.289
media company first, then whatever it
is they actually do. If you know
464
00:34:07.409 --> 00:34:10.880
this is true, but your team
is already maxed out and you can't produce
465
00:34:10.920 --> 00:34:15.920
any more content in house, we
can help. We produced podcast for some
466
00:34:15.960 --> 00:34:19.800
of the most innovative bb brands in
the world and we also help them turn
467
00:34:19.880 --> 00:34:23.670
the content from the podcast into blog
posts, micro videos and slide decks that
468
00:34:23.750 --> 00:34:27.469
work really well on Linkedin. If
you want to learn more, go to
469
00:34:27.510 --> 00:34:31.710
sweet fish Mediacom launch or email logan
at sweetish Mediacom