How Roger West Gained Structure and Scale Without Losing Creativity

All right, welcome back to Agency Journey. This is Gray McKenzie from Zenpilot. And this week, I've got the pleasure of bringing on Misty Ferris, who is the integrator, also known as the vice President of operations. But in the theme of this conversation, we're going to be talking about your role, Misty, as integrator at a cool agency called Roger West Creative and Code. Welcome to the podcast. I'm super excited for this.

Thanks, Greg. It's really nice of you to invite me. I'm super excited to talk about all things eos and marketing in general.

Well, you've got even more than just the eos side. Like, we've got a bunch to to dig into. You put in, like, the podcast intake form that we have Talked about, your 3M mantra. What is the 3M mantra?

So for me, it is always first and foremost. I'm a mom of four daughters, and I've been a mom for a lot of years now, we'll say almost a century. And I just feel like there's a talent and a patience level that you gain from being a parent that is beneficial to working with people and businesses people. So that one sticks with me. I know in some industries and then some centuries ago, maybe being a mom wasn't something that was super valued at the workplace, but I think that the longer time goes on, there really are some super parallel benefits to running a business and raising good humans. So that's the first time. And then there's minimalism. I try to do the most I can with the least amount of resources and keep things super simple in life and in marketing and in making sure that the people around me are happy at home and at work. So that seems to be the quickest route to get that result. And then there is marketing. That is my true passion. I really am enthused when I get to help other businesses grow. That's part of why I came to Roger west is that it had tons of potential along with a great track record of building their business on their own. But they were at a pivotal moment where they could decide, no, is this good enough for us, or do we really want to shoot for the moon? And that really attracts me to anything in life that's raising kids or making people happy. Is is okay enough, or do you want to just keep building on that? Yeah, that's where it comes from.

That's awesome. So I've got four kids as well. Very similar age ranges. My oldest is seven. Youngest is turning to tomorrow, but I've got two and two. What's the. What's the experience like having four girls?

It is interesting. There. There's a lot of girly stuff that happens. I'm very fortunate that they are. They're super well rounded, and I only get a lot of drama for maybe one and a half of them. And then, you know, I get. I get the more down to earth and practical stuff from. From the rest. And so I think there's a good balance. But if had four that were. That were more of the stereotypical dramatic girl, that would probably be a little tough for me. And I do. I did have two at the same time that were teenagers and that. That's a lot of work.

That sounds like, oh, man, that's awesome. Well, a lot of those skills, managing all of that. Some of the best teammates that I have now are moms who are. I don't know how they're. They're balancing and juggling it all, but they're excellent at it, which is super cool. And I think sometimes, even as I say that, like, I think sometimes there's. There's a whole bunch of transferable skills between the two. I think sometimes it's easy to say that and say, hey, time management and organization, like, those are kind of the stereotypicals or. But like, those are the ones that I think that are easy to recognize and skip out on. A lot of being a parent is a ton of leadership. Like, you are tested as a leader so much, and I think that's one of. I mean, there's a million different transferable skills, but that's one of the skills that nobody really, at least I hear very rarely talked about as coming from being a mom or being a parent to the workplace.

I think that's the piece that I take with me the most, especially right now where I am in my role with us, implementing a new EOS structure and growing people into their own leadership roles so that we can grow the company. You have to be a really good leader on your own, and that means at the heart, you have to care about the people and you have to have what's best for them at the heart of everything that you do, all the decisions that you make. And that is a skill I learned a long time ago from parenting. I can't always say yes to every single thing, but I can explain what the benefits are around the decision and why it's being made. And it really does help you be more personable and make people aware that you care. And that's why you're pushing for whatever you're pushing for. Whether it's to correct a behavior or if it's to promote something to push a little bit harder. I often get the kids asking me, well, why are you so tough on me about this? And I'm like, well, it's important because there's a conversation that happens after that and then they get it and then the next thing you know, not without struggle, but the next thing you know, you know they're working and making success towards that. And that definitely translates into growing leaders on a team as well.

Yeah. Let's dig into the agency a little bit. So Roger west, who do you serve and how do you help them?

So we serve enterprise level clients, small and medium sized businesses as well. And we're looking for clients who are in multiple industries. But we do have the most expertise when it comes to restaurant, health care, logistics and tech spaces. We're looking for clients who are in high growth mode and who really value the expertise that an agency can bring and are really looking for someone to just. Here's my list of marketing deliverables that I need. I need someone to just crank them out in a production line. We are a production based company, we do that, but we're also, we lead with from a point of strategy and holistic view. So those are the customers that we serve and we stay very busy trying to keep up with that because when they're in high growth mode they need a lot of help and a lot of support and that's what makes us thrive.

When you start with strategy, is that part of a longer retainer or a larger project or is that its own separate piece of the engagement?

Yeah, we do both. We see the most benefit when we're able to build a long term relationship with the client. We have multiple clients, clients for more over five years. We have some, as many as over a decade. And when you get to that point in a relationship with a client, you've really built a level of trust that you're basically an internal part of their team at that level. But even at a project, someone's coming to us for a one off project. We're happy to take that on. We just build into that project timeline, enough time to really understand their business and not just from our point of view, but from their point of view as well. So there's a lot of uptime, friend time around discovery and really getting into their heads. We're always looking for people who are, who have the capacity to partner with us that are the clients that we serve the best. If it's someone that's just looking. Hey, I've got X, Y and Z to do and I want you to figure it all out. We can and we have, but usually what is the end result of that is something that, well, if we had known you were going to do this, we would have told you about this other type of service we have or X, you know, Persona we fee is a server, whatever. And there's always just that missing element that could have made the effort that much better. So we put in a lot of effort into putting that strategy in upfront, but also bringing the clients around to understanding the value of that upfront time that they're investing into the project.

Yeah, that makes sense. And what does for context team is as we're talking about kind of the EOS journey and internal ops. What's the team size and is it all remote, all in person, hybrid? What's the structure?

That's my favorite part of Roger West. We are at 25 teammates now full time. We do have an official hybrid structure, but we are mostly in person. People like to get in here and work together. I know that's a weird hot topic right now. We'll come back for the culture and then you come back and it's a little cubicle. Roger west is, is not like that. Today we have mimosas and homemade omelets by our CEO. It's also, and we really do put a lot of focus on enjoying each other as people and that we do have. We have all sorts of departments internally. So of those 25 people, we've got a development team full of years and years of experience design, We've got a content strategy team, we've got, you know, our client experience team. I'm missing something, I'm sure. Well, we've got all the services that we provide, our in house whole digital, paid media services all combined under two roofs now because we just expanded into our neighboring building. But it's all. We all work together on a daily basis. It's really weird the types of things that you miss. Again, that little piece of missing information that may not have come up when you can actually kind of hear what's going on. Oh, there's a meeting going on over here. And I walked back as I went in to get some, you know, whatever coffee or swag for somebody I was mailing out or whatever and you're like, oh, I just heard about this going on for this client. Have you talked to this other person over here? And just the collaboration that you miss. There's something to be said for that. We were full time in office before COVID And then of course, when Covid hit, we got everybody shut down and we sent everybody home. So we had to learn how to be a full time remote agency during that time. And what we found is that our whole mission, everything that we do at Roger west, is to make our clients look and feel good. You will hear that a hundred times if you're ever in a Roger west office. And the piece that we lost during COVID was really our ability to know that that was happening. You thought, okay, we did pretty good, but you just weren't sure which pieces were missing out. What we could have done, that little bit of extra to give the project or the campaign a little bit of something extra that would have really made the client look like a superstar to their team, because that's really what we strive for. We want everybody that we work with to go back to their board or their leadership at their company. And they're looking at them like, oh, this is our marketing guy. How did they pull out this crazy results? Whether they give Roger west the credit or not is up to them. It's really them. Like I said, we partner with them to make them, you know, be able to succeed in whatever their goals are.

Yeah, that's awesome. So with the entrepreneurial operating system, how did you find out about it? What's the, what's the story or what's the journey?

So Roger west found out about the EOS operating system. Our CEO hangs out with a bunch of other CEOs and some, some, lots of different networking type groups. And of course, some of them had heard of it, a couple of them were operating on it, and just some, some struggles that he had for running a business for 13 years. And, you know, starting to see the same patterns have been happening over and over. EOS talks about hitting the ceiling, and he was identifying that, and so he thought, well, I've been trying it my own way. Let me, let me take some advice for some of the other people who've gone and take things a step further. And so he tried eos. He brought it to the leadership team. And, you know, we did our research and we spent about actually maybe like seven months just at the leadership team level, which I realized a really long time, especially in a marketing agency. It's a long time for anything. But we spent that time just trying to operate on it as a leadership team, to vet it, because we are a creative agency. And like I said, we've got a full team here of people who really like to be able to write the way they want to write and build code the way that they know is the best way to do it, and design standards that they've been, you know, holding themselves accountable to for decades. You know, so we didn't want to put something in place that we thought would stifle creativity. And so when we were looking for an operating system, that was our litmus test. And so if we couldn't run on it as a leadership team and still be able to be the people that we are and not be held hostage by a bunch of rules or something like that, then we weren't willing to roll it out company wide, but successfully we, we were able to come to the decision that, yep, this, this can work for a creative agency. And we rolled it out to the team in January of last year. So we were coming up on one year with the full team rollout and we're, we are doing better than we ever have before. So this year, just this month actually, we won small business of the year. And a lot of that is aligned with the discipline and the accountability that we've been able to put in place. Along with measuring success. We were able to translate that into some other ways where we're being recognized for that.

So that's awesome. Was it replacing any, like, standardized system? So there's a bunch of pieces there.

But yeah, we definitely, that's our biggest pain point is there was no standard way of doing anything. And I think that came along with bucketing a bunch of creative people into one work area. Everybody just kind of figured it out. We've got a really strong team of people who definitely can and will figure it out if there's no way of doing it. So, you know, that's what built Roger west is people deciding that, okay, this needs to be done. I'm going to find a way to get it done. But in order to scale, you have to take that responsibility off of those people. Let them focus their. Get it done. You know, that need for them to be really, really good at something, let them focus that through their skill and not on building your business. And that's, that's been the best part for us, I think, is being able to say, well, I can't. I don't have to expect this guy figured out. Here's what we think needs to happen. Here's your fear, here's your guardrails, and you tell me if it doesn't work and we'll work together to get it, you know, get it aligned with what you need. But we definitely didn't have anything in place before eos and so we saw some immediate improvements just for that look.

That's awesome. What. So I'm assuming prior to that, prior to rolling it out in January, you'd gone through your vision building days as a leadership too. So then rolling out, do you remember rolling out the VTO to the team and setting that through your picture and saying, hey, here's where we're going or the 10 year vision or whatever, you know, whatever your long term target is. How was that received originally? Was it, were there any big surprises or like good, bad, ugly? What was that?

That was a good day. People were kind of shocked to know that we were sharing these big aspirational go. I think some members of the team had maybe heard, you know, maybe the CEO might have mentioned something about how they want to grow over, over a certain amount of time in a casual conversation here or there, but certainly as a group and most of the people on the team had never heard anything like that about what is this company doing? And one of the processes that we quickly changed because of eos was our recruiting and onboarding process. And that's the thing that we've most consistently. So that one's been in place the longest of why I mention it, but consistent feedback around that since that's been in place is that I'm really surprised from all of our new vendors, I'm really surprised that you guys share so much information about this and what if you don't hit the goal? You know, aren't you worried about that? And you know, my answer is no. You know, we don't put goals out there because we think we might hit them. We put goals out there because we expect to hit them. And if we don't hit them, we've got to, we've got to pivot, we've got to make things better really quickly because failing is really not option for us.

So yeah, how about what came? What's, what's been the most challenging or the piece of the entrepreneurial operating system that have been the hardest to make work in the Roger west environment.

I, I am the type of person who really loves process and organization. So for me it's hard to relate to what was the hardest part. So I'm just going to have to lean on some of the things that I've heard from from some other people. And I do know the thing that we first had everybody read. What the heck is eos? That's one of the suggested steps when you roll it out, that's everybody's first rock is to read that very simplistic what the heck is EOS first guide there? And one of the questions that we got the most around after people were concluding with that what's this people analyzer about? How do I stack up on that? Because the book tells them to ask. Hey, your leaders are talking about these things about you ask for that feedback if you haven't already heard it. I think the name of it actually puts a little bit of pressure on it. Nobody wants to be analyzed as a person like that doesn't. That doesn't feel great. So if I had any feedback for EOS directly I think I would tell them as a brand new company I'd be like listen, your brand could benefit from a few different positioning angles. Outside of that, once we explained to people what the people analyzer was meant to do and we actually started calling it our core values and GWC assessment instead of calling it our people analyzer.

Sure.

And it seems to be a welcome addition now. But in the beginning I do know that there was a little bit of just the unknown was there and it didn't sound like something that they wanted to be a part of. So that was. That took a little bit of time to understand and understand why we were doing it with the benefit could be and how what they can expect of it.

Yeah, that's funny. I. I forgot to ask this question. Are you working with a professional implementer or are you self implemented?

Yeah, no, we are working with a professional implementer. His name is Ross Gibbs and he is out of Fort Myers area and big shout out to him for putting up with us because we, you know we put him through the test.

That's awesome. How is the experience? I had some conversations with folks around rolling out the quarterly conversations or the 55 5. How in having bidirectional evaluations or whatever you call that from manager to their to the employee versus individual contributor to the manager. How has that rollout been and how's that been received by the team? And also was that replacing did you have weekly or bi weekly one on ones previously that that replaced or did you keep those? What's been the dynamic around those?

So prior to the feedback section from eos we really didn't have anything formal in place. We did have some employees who really thrived on feedback. So they would say to their manager, okay, I want to know how this is going. In my case specifically I was like I'm doing my review if you're not going to do it. And I came up with A review process and reviewed myself and I don't know, I think I came up with a C minus or something. Overall, it was just horrible. And my boss was like, that's not at all accurate. You're being too hard on yourself. But I needed something and there really wasn't here anything in place and so it didn't replace anything formalized. But there were some people who were really into trying to gain that feedback. So we've given them a vehicle to do that now and then. As far as how's it going with that two way street that we're creating where our teammates are allowed to assess and give the feedback to their team lead, how are they doing as a big part of that conversation? That's a part that we're still really trying to encourage. I think our new people leaders have done a really great job diving into the one on one conversations and making sure that, you know, they're really, they by nature care about their teams already. So they want to know like, hey, is everything going okay for you? What could be better? Here's some things that we can work on together. All of those conversations are happening in depth and I've been super. You know, I often say that my little organized heart, you know, it's all flutter when those types of things happen. But for the as far as the team really giving the feedback to their team leads, I feel like there's still a little bit of room to grow there because it's just if you haven't done it before, I guess it can be a little bit daunting if you're not sure how that person might take it or you don't want to maybe be seen as someone who's stepping beyond their bounds or something. And so I think we still have a little bit of room to improve around that, to really make people understand that it's okay. Like whatever your feedback is, it's super valuable because that's gonna, that's gonna make us operate better as a team. I'm excited to see how that grows now that people have had the chance to really, you know, like I said, we're almost a year into it, so we're getting closer to that. And I'm excited.

Right. 25 people full time in the office. What's the size of the leadership team?

We have six people on our leadership team. We have, we've talked about whether or not that should be condensed a little bit because it is a little heavy. So I think there, we don't think actually there is a plan in place as we grow for that to be condensed just a little bit. Sure. But we've had, we do have a large number of people here at Roger west who've just been here for a super long time. Yeah. 8, 9, 12, and even 15 years, as long as the business has been in business. And so when we're going through a change as big as implementing an operating system, it just didn't seem like the right choice to exclude all the experience and van data. The advantage of having them on this team and same with things that have been happening for the past 15 years and not, you know, gaining something from that. So we went through the process actually, actually our vision building day after that we were like, okay, now, now that that's happened, we can kind of scale back. We got their feedback and they're super humble. So no one was. There were no issues. No, you know, nobody throwing a fit like, oh, I'm not going to be on the leadership team or anything like that. That's not a. We don't have any kind of dynamics like that here in Roger West. So they're humble and they're like, okay, you know, I'm a step out, you guys take it from here. You know, I'm giving you all the feedback that I can think of and we've got a plan and I'm just going to help carry it out. That's the way to go. And we operated that way for probably until about maybe three months ago. We decided like, hey, there are some decisions that we've made along the way that probably could have been better informed if we had these people at the table. So we're testing out a new structure right now. That. And as you know, with the accountability chart, it's ever evolving. So we're on V2 right now and this version does include a few more people back at the leadership team level.

Yeah, that's awesome. It's just super fun for me having these conversations, like just talking with John Heritage from Even Bound, same team size and just around what their leadership team looks like, or Paul Earnedon, who's at fuelus and they're a little larger team. But just like, I think helpful feedback for people to hear like, hey, how are agency leadership teams structured and what's the process been like? One thing I've been asking people as well is around the tooling. Are you running on 90io or are you using a separate tool to manage EOS? What's been working or not working there?

So there were two tools proposed to us by our implementer. It was, I think Trackcha Tools, which has now been renamed and then the 90io. I did the test for both, went through a couple of demos. I really didn't love them. So again, because I'm organized, I decided to go with the sheer Excel format and I kind of just made my own templates for L10s and rocks and scorecards and all of that kind of stuff. So I went that route for that. But then when the EOS1 platform beta came out, I was invited to that and that one I actually do enjoy quite a bit. We haven't made the trip, so we're using that at the leadership level, but we haven't rolled that out to the whole team yet because we haven't decided that again, you only want to put so much change out there all at once. And they're kind of all comfortable with the shared spreadsheets right now, so we'll probably, probably wait till a little calmer period and put a new platform in the next.

So that's cool. That's helpful to know as we look ahead. We're recording this here at the end of or near the End Q4 of 22. What are what's on your not just EOS, but kind of agency wide. Like what's on your radar and goals list for for 2023?

A lot. Some really good stuff mentioned that we met one Small Business of the Year awarded by the Tampa Bay Chamber this past month and we're now able to compete at a national level for small business. And so we're beginning that journey and that's something exciting and unknown to us. We've never tipped our toe there. We've got some big client things happening. We've got some clients that are kind of opening up to some new experiences and whether it's service lines or products or people that they serve, and we're heavily involved in some projects that are really going to change the shape of those businesses. That always amps up our team quite a bit. So we'll see some fun work coming out of that. And then we've also, we're really still I thought that the leadership team at least, or maybe the greater team overall would kind of be quote unquote over this EOS stuff by now. Like, you know, this isn't really happening, but it's really starting to actually stick now. And so we've got some really big goals to finish up the end of the year and then going into 2023 around documenting our core processes. You know, Roger west is looking to grow through multiple avenues, not just you know, by signing on new clients and doing that. But we've got some other business ventures as well. And I think being able to document everything that we do at a high level, you know, using the OS process, the 80% of the stuff that, you know, creates the biggest impact for us is what we're focusing on. And I think getting that done will throw us over the mark of being able to say, okay, we've got this down to a system now. It's just about making it better. And that's my most exciting thing. If you had somebody else on this call from the team, they probably have a lot of different things. Like I said, I really love process. So.

Yes. That's awesome. Was it safe space for process narratives? Talking to the fellow process there? Well, that's awesome. Other than the website rogerwest.com to find the site, is there anywhere else we should push people to follow you or the agency?

We, I mean they're social channels, I suppose we're pretty quiet out there. We. We don't do too much bragging about yourself. Yeah. The website is of course a great resource, but honestly because do have pretty cool spaces to hang out. We love having visitors. We have people show up here at the office. We have lots of friends and colleagues that'll use our space for whatever reason they need to use the space for. So if you're ever in the Tampa area, this is the place to hang out. We will definitely make sure you have a good time while you're here. And other than that, I would say just follow us. I mean we do a lot on LinkedIn I guess is probably where we're the most active. There's some silly stuff you can follow on TikTok and all that, but I don't recommend it did so.

That's awesome. That's the best, best way to get clicks. You're. You're clearly a mom. Yeah, I mean I don't, I don't recommend that. I definitely don't clean. Definitely don't clean your room today. That be great. That's motivating action. That's awesome. Well, this has been super fun, Misty. Thanks for coming on to me. Wanted to share your journey and, and experience with EOS as well.

Thank you, Gray. It's been a great conversation. I've enjoyed it.