Creating a Culture with Your Team and Clients

Hey, what's up, guys? Welcome back to Agency Journey. This is Andrew, and this week I'm excited to chat with John Pulitzky. John owns We Speak Easy, which is a digital agency in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, just down the road from me. And in this conversation, we dive deep into how John has, from the beginning said that his agency is going to be different in the way that it treats its employees and the way that it treats and retains its clients. This was a really fun interview because John goes deep into the processes, the rhythms that he uses to create tight agency, family, and then also how they retain customers through a similar approach. So check out this interview. John does a great job just sharing where they're at, what they do. You're going to enjoy it. How do you build an agency that allows you to live the dream that you have for yourself, for your family, for your community, for your team, while at the same time helping your clients knock it out of the park and doing it all profitably? These are the big questions that we tackle here on the Agency Journey podcast. I am your host, Andrew Demski. Now let's get to it. Hey, John. Welcome to Agency Journey. So excited to have you here, man. Would you mind introducing yourself to everyone who's listening right now and share a little bit of your background and how you got to where you are today?

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Andrew. So my name is John Politzky. I own We Speak Easy, which is a digital marketing and design firm. And my story is, I guess, not wholly unique, but I have an IT background. I have 25 years of IT experience. I was working for an IT managed services provider. I didn't like the way that we turned customers and turned employees. I kind of felt like I could do a better job of IT myself, which was probably very naive and foolish. So I decided to start an IT company. When I was leaving, a few super nice people decided that they were going to come with me and took a stand and were like, hey, we're coming with you. And I was like, thank you, but I can't pay you. So this is a horrible idea for you in your career, which is awesome to know. You have great friends. But what we did was we just decided, okay, well, let's see how we can make this work. And they were website developers. So I basically said, hey, let's sell a couple websites and try to get you guys paid while we're getting this IT thing up off the ground. And then we started doing websites. We started doing, like, basic template WordPress websites. And then, you know, a couple people Came out of the woodwork and said, hey, do you guys do SEO? And I was like, I don't know what SEO is, but sure. And then we figured that out, and then eventually somebody said, do you do social media? And then it was Facebook ads. And here we are five years later, and we're an actual agency, which is kind of scary, but, you know, it's just weird how things work sometimes, I guess.

Yeah, the dominoes just start falling. That's awesome.

So we're.

How did you guys get the name? We speak Easy.

So we originally started out as JDMK Consulting, which is a terrible business name. And it was just the initials of everybody who I thought was influential in me starting the company, which I thought was kind of cool, but everybody. What you realize when you start a company is it makes sense to you. But then everybody would call and be like, hey, is this MJ DK or JM dk? So it just was super confusing. And I was like, look, let's move to something that makes a little more sense. And we had, like. I always like telling people we had, like, this huge epiphany moment. We didn't. We sat in a room for, like, 80 hours and talked about all different Latin derivatives and all the dumb things that you come up with. And we landed on Speakeasy Creative initially, and we rocked with that for a little bit. And then I kept getting the like, oh, are you guys a bar? Do you have. Do you sell drinks? Like, all this stuff? And I'm like. And my wife hated the idea. It was hilarious. So we just moved into action words. And when we bought the original website domain, Speakeasy Creative wasn't available. So we went with wespeakeasy.com and then as we kept moving down the path, we were like, hey, we should just. Instead of this being this cute, little fun speakeasy theme, let's go with the what we really want to do. And what we really want to do is make marketing and web development simple and easy for people. And now we actually do have a story, and now it actually makes sense. Instead of me sitting around going like, yeah, we came up with this great idea about Speakeasy and you being able to find your website through, like, the darkness. It was so dumb. So now it makes a little more sense. So that's where we're at.

That's awesome. I love that. I also like that it was the kind of your friction around customer churn and employee churn that led you to start your own business.

How has you decided to do this on your own. There's no, you know, nobody teaches you how to run a company. Yeah. Is that. It's super difficult. It's, you know, it's not. When I worked at my old company, we lost so many clients and I always prided myself. I never lost the customer. The whole time was there. I was there for seven years and I was basically the director of it. So I had a lot of client facing clients, touching things. And what you find is when you're on your own, you make, you have to make these difficult decisions every day that you don't realize when you work for a company, you don't see the like, oh, this client's destroying us. You know, we did a. We maybe we're doing a 20 hour project or. And we're 100 hours in and we can't change the scope of work and we're not making money. And the same thing with employees. You know, people, whether it's a client or employee, you know, we have our first core values is we have a strict no asshole rule. Right. So it's the, it's something that's taken a long time to do and it's something that you have to decide that you're going to live and die by. And that's basically what we've done is we've just decided like, let's find people that are a pleasure to work with, that want to work with us. And the same thing for employees. And you know, as we've gotten through this five year, as we're hitting five years now, I've really learned it's an old cliche that you have to hire slow and fire fast. Because by the time I know somebody's not doing a good job, whether it's a client that's not cooperative or it's an employee everyone else knows, the whole company knows.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, you know, I kind of just fueled it to make it like, this is my family. I'm here more than I see my wife or anybody. So pick great people to work with. And if you do that, as we've learned over the past couple years, things kind of start falling into place little by little.

Yeah. How, like, how do you get to that point? Because you go through so much bringing somebody on, finding the right person to actually go through the process of firing quickly. Has that been a journey for you to get to that point where you can do that? Because, like, at least from my perspective, I always think that you have so much invested in something, you don't want to just cut it off and let it go. You always want to try to keep pruning it, but obviously that can bleed out after a while. How do you. How have you processed that?

It's super painful. So what I think, what you learn is that I think as business owners and CEOs or whatever, we kind of start getting. You start getting a feeling about somebody after they're with you for a while. And, you know, yeah, this person kind of gets it or they don't. And for me, the hardest thing is when you see somebody that you know isn't going to make it. And it could be a client, could be an employee, but, you know, and then, you know, we all have that little gene in us that thinks we can fix somebody. Right, Right. We've all been in those relationships where you're like, yeah, this guy or this girl's crazy, but, you know, I feel like they just need help, and you waste a lot of time and a lot of money. And you're right. Like, bringing people on, you know how difficult it is to. Especially an agency. It's process. It's, hey, you need to get these eight HubSpot certifications. You need to go through these digital marketer courses. You need to go through this and that. And then it's, you know, you have to learn software. And then all of a sudden, you're six months in and you're like, oh, man, this isn't working out. So for me, and especially for my employees that are like director level or manager level, it's so difficult. And they constantly come to me and say, I don't want to let this person go, or, I think we can fix it, then what you find out is after we all sit down and make the decision together and we let them go, if it's a client or an employee, they always come back a month later and go, yeah, we 100% made the right decision. So you just need to shorten that time cycle. And that's what I keep trying to get them to, like, hey, let's try to fix it, and let's do everything we can. Sink as much time and energy into it, but do it quickly. And then realize the quicker you realize it, and then let's move on, because it's killing us. We can't let you know, our last core value is if the tree dies, we die. So we all have to focus on the company as the greater good. Let's fix this. It's our body that we have to get through this life with.

Yeah, no, that's. I mean, it's cool to point direct action back to your core values too, and say, this is why we need to do something like that. And it's cool to hear you guys are pushing into those hard conversations rather than running away from them, because that's going to build a stronger company. Now, you said when you were introing that you have kind of a nationwide agency now or a global agency now.

Yeah.

Can you talk us through your team structure and how you guys are dispersed, whether it's in house or remote?

Yeah, we're primarily in house. I've always struggled. I need structure in my life, so I'm not somebody that can work at home. If I was at home, I'd be playing PlayStation or playing with the dogs. So I need to like being an officer on people. So I struggled with having remote employees, but I find that it's great if you have, you know, we use Scrum and as a little bit of agile management. So as long as everybody knows what the goals are, as long as you have frequent meetings and it could be Skype or Slack or whatever it is, it works. So I would say majority of our employee, 90% of our people are still in house and they all pick a day or two a week that they work from home, but they're always here for important meetings. Fridays we have dedicated to us as a company because we're all terrible at agencies, at marketing ourselves. So Fridays are us. So everyone's here on Friday. And then remote people, we just have them up on a TV with us. But it's difficult. It's a challenge to have it. And our structure is fairly straightforward. So we use the kind of typical pod system where each team has like an account manager, social media person, a developer, a graphic designer and a marketer. And those people all work together on their 10 or 15 accounts based on how big or small they are. And then that way it breaks down and then there's just division heads above them. So we try to have as little management and keep it as much a meritocracy as possible. And then those division heads are just there to provide deadlines and guidance.

Awesome. And then do you guys. Do you promote from within those pods? Like when you. When it comes time that there's too many clients in the tiller, how do you grow from there?

Yeah, we would. So we, we've learned. It's really weird. We've really struggled with a couple different areas and one is graphic design. For some reason, it's been a super challenge for us to hire graphic designers. I don't know if they're super, like maybe we're. Most of us are super logical, they're super creative and we just have this flux of like, I'm like, hey, we have deadlines. And they're. I just love coffee and playing records. And I'm like, all right, let's go. So we've struggled with that. But yeah, what we do now is instead of we used to hire people and then try to do like a 90 day or 180 day spin up where we're having these reviews every couple weeks. And now what we do is we really leverage internships or externships. So we bring in a lot of like super. Right now I think the only thing that we ever hire is high level if we really need it. And then super low level and try to bring everybody up in Oregon organization so that they're all familiar with the core values. They all treat it like a family. They all know everybody. They've been here a while and that has. That methodology has seemed to work best for us. Anytime that we've hired mid level talent, it's always been a struggle. So high level when we really need it, like a project manager or somebody who's got a specialty set, like a Google AdWords specialist. And then for the most part it's bring them in young and get them to buy in and then learn everything and, and keep retaining that person. Train them, pay them well, keep giving them raises and promote them within.

Awesome. And then has the kind of creating that family feel there by bringing people up from the bottom. Can you walk us through how your Friday blocks have helped structure that and create that? Like, is that just marketing for the agency or is that like team building stuff? What goes into that?

Yeah, it's both. So generally speaking, we do team buildings. We do Thursday night and then it bleeds into everybody coming in at like noon on Friday. So what we do is general. We do every month we do a kind of night out in Philly with the team. So we'll do. Whether it's a comedy show or we've done like eight Escape the Rooms. I don't know why we keep doing that, but we do. So we keep doing these different things. We'll go to a bar, we'll just hang out and it works. This week we're doing. On Thursday night we're doing. We decided spoiler alert. We're giving cookies out to all our clients. So we're making cookies on Thursday night. So everybody's coming over and. And we're going to do it together as A team. And every, you know, it's. And I hate, what I hate is when you see companies that, that and are like, it's mandatory. We're doing this thing on Thursday night. Like, I never want to be that guy. So for us it's always like, hey, this is what we're doing. You're more than welcome to come if you feel like you want to be. You know, if you want to. If you could tolerate us outside of work and hang out for a little bit at school. If not, you know, no one's forced to come and make cookies in my house. And then, so, and then Fridays what we do is we just talk about strategy and sometimes we do like these little creative collisions about clients where we'll say, hey, you know, this is the one day where we can all kind of just be together. And if you're struggling with something with a client, you can't figure out this campaign or we can't figure out why they don't like the mock ups or the wireframes or whatever it is, let's talk about it. And then usually from like 11 o' clock on, we'll grab lunch, have everybody have lunch together. And then we start digging into like, okay, what are the open items for us? Let's get blogs written, let's get things qa, let's add landing pages to our website, whatever it might be.

Okay. That's awesome. That must be, it's nice to have that brain, brain dump time or brainstorming time to tackle together. That's awesome.

Yes. Yep.

Okay, so that I think we've, and thank you for sharing just like how you, how you work to serve your team. Well, if we flip it to the other side and talk about how you guys serve your clients. Well, what are, how do you guys structure like your client communication rhythms just to kind of keep them engaged in what you're doing and make sure that they're happy.

So that's a great question. So we've, this is something we've really struggled with and it's hard for me because my emphasis in my whole career has always been on customer and client communication. So I've always been trained to over communicate with clients, call all the time, you know, like just keep people up to speed. My whole philosophy has always been like, hey, if you're, you know, if you're going to be late for a meeting, you don't show up 20 minutes late. You call 15 minutes ahead of time. You're like, hey, I'm running late. No one ever cares. And the Kind of methodology that I've tried to teach to everybody here is that the most important thing you can do is have relationships with your clients. And again, the same thing with me as a boss or whatever. You can't force real or. Right. Like, the keyword, like everybody says now is authenticity. Right? You can't fake that because people smell it a mile away. So you can't. You can't just try to be friends. Like, I always, like, my employees will be like, hey, so and so's, you know, sick, or somebody's having a baby, can I send them flowers? Or whatever. And of course, the answer is always yes. But my thing is always, like, don't just do it because they had a baby and they're a client. And it's like the checkbox. It's like, do you have a relationship with this person? Like, is it going to be weird that you're sending somebody a birthday card? You know? So, like, have a real relationship and try to find common ground and find these things that you relate to with these people. Because what you find is that we're always going to screw up, right? We're always going to do something wrong. We're always going to make mistakes. We're always going to not fulfill some promise that we said that we were going to do. That's normal. We're human. So what I find is that if you have those relationships, clients going to call you up and be like, yo, dude, what's going on? Get your stuff together, man. Let's get this done. We're trying to hit this goal. I haven't heard from you in two weeks. You guys were supposed to get this done. When you don't have those relationships, what I find is that you don't ever get that phone call. They're just gone. You get the call of like, hey, we moved all our websites and you know, we're with. We're with another agency now. And you're like, oh, man, that was terrible.

Yeah.

Yeah. So that's our methodology. And it's always been a struggle for us. For some reason, I'm introverted, and I tend to hire introverted people. So it's been, you know, sometimes we have to force ourselves to hire somebody who's extroverted to do more of that client communication. Because I think that it is an area that we really struggle with sometimes.

Awesome. Well, it's neat to know that, like, you've recognized it and it's interesting, like, the personality side too. Like, the personalities that you tend to hire versus those that you Know you need to, but wouldn't be natural. A natural fit. I've never thought about that way. But that'd be a good, a good study for all owners to kind of take a perspective into. Am I just trying to hire Mini Me's?

It's totally true. It is too. And you find it. And even with our staff, we'll do interviews and generally we do, I'll interview somebody and then they'll interview them together and then they'll come back and be like, hey, this person. I was like, were they good? Were they smart? Yeah, they're really annoying though. I'm like, were they annoying just because they talked and they were friendly? Because we're all introverted and you just want peace and quiet in the office. But it's interesting to see that. But it's true. We do it. We all do it.

That's cool. So from your, from the client side of things, are you started and just kind of jumped into websites right out of the gate to pay your early team members? But how have your services kind of shaped over the past five years and what, how have they standardized as you guys have continued to scale? What does that typical client journey look like for you guys?

Sure. So the one, I think the one good thing that we did when we started the company was I came from a managed services IT background. So when I was with my other, we really transitioned out of hourly work altogether and everything was retainer based or fixed, monthly fee based. So even the first clients that we signed we started with monthly. So I just wanted to make sure that when, if we were bringing people on or we were hiring people, I needed to make sure that I knew what our budget was and how we could do this. So that like the mic, oh, we're going to do a $5,000 website and then we're going to do a $800 whatever. And that was like a nightmare to me. So even at the very beginning, we started out selling like, okay, we're gonna do a WordPress website. Great, it's gonna be 6,000 bucks. And they were like, we have 600. I'm like, great, it's gonna be 600 bucks. So we started doing the like $200, $300 a month websites. And my methodology was always like, look, all we have to do is a good job. And if we do a good job, we're gonna make money in the second year, the third year, the fourth year, because it's gonna be gravy. We're just gonna be doing website updates and hosting and backing up the things are cool and then doing little redesign things. And then as we've moved on, obviously we added SEO and then we added social and all these other things. And then we got into marketing. So now most of our retainers are full marketing retainers with scrum points. And I've struggled. We've gone back and forth with using a point system versus just being like, look, it's three grand, it's about 20 some hours. Like, you know, like we're all business owners, like, let's just get this done. But we try to standardize as much as possible with, hey, you're getting 40 points. And this is what the points mean. Like a blog is X amount of points. And you know, if we're doing social media posts and really for us it just gets down to like, you know, I'm a huge proponent of gray area, which is probably really bad. As a business owner, I don't like black and white. I like the ability to say, hey, look, we're just gonna do a good job and it's all gonna come out, it's all gonna work itself out in the wash. And you know, if you're taking advantage of us and we know if we're taking advantage of you, so let's all be human and figure this out. So I prefer that. But now we're pretty standard and you know, most of our retainers include goals and points and this is what we're going to do and this is what our expectations are.

Awesome. And then what's your. How frequently are you meeting with clients to set those deliverables and kind of allocate those points?

So we're on a basic 90 day cycle now. We started with a month, which was crazy. I don't know why we thought we could do anything in a month. And then we went to eight weeks and now we're at 12 weeks. So basically we follow the standard HubSpot ish rotation of hey, we're going to do like the initial sit down, get our smart goals together, talk about what our deliverables are going to be. We're going to try to get 1000 hits to this page. From that, we're going to get 100 people to fill out the form. From that, 10 people are going to become leads, whatever it is. And then what we do is we have a quick and Generally it's like 10 to 15 minute call every week. Here's where we're at. Do we need to tweak anything? Do we need to change the landing pages? And then, you know, basically it's, we go through the progression of here's the work that we did. So we're spinning up all the landing pages, we're writing all the blogs, we're getting all the ebooks done, whatever it is, or video. And then it's just a matter of those weekly 10, 15 minute calls to tweak. At the end of like 60 days, we have like a more of a come to Jesus, like, oh, crap, we're not going to hit these goals or, or the like, hey, we knocked it out of the park and we sold 100 things. We thought we're gonna sell 10. Let's double down on Facebook ads or let's add budget here. And then at 90 days we're hitting the like, hey, here's the report of what happened. Here's, you know, going back through the standard gdd, like growth driven design methodology of here's our hypothesis for next month, here's what we think is going to make the change and then digging into that.

Awesome. Okay, cool, man. John, thank you so much for kind of breaking everything down for us. From your team and the way you guys treat your clients, I can tell you put a lot of thought and intentionality into how you treat both of those. And it's neat that that goes all the way back to your reasons for starting the company. So if anyone's listening, they have any questions, is there any way they can reach out and say hi to you?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you can. Anybody can get me@jpespeakeasy.com or I'm on social media. John P. Speak easy and feel free to reach out. I'm always available.

Awesome. Well, John, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your agency Journey. It's been a pleasure.

Thank you so much, Andrew. I appreciate it, man.

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