How to Create the Agency You’d Like to Hire with Whitney Mitchell

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Hi, Gray. How you doing?

I'm excited for this one. I'm doing great because we're going to get a quick profile of kind of what is Beacon Digital Marketing. Where are you the type of agency? And then I'm excited to talk about a couple different things, but specifically focus in on team culture and the way that you've built the team to date. So start with the background. You gave me a little bit of the story, solo founder, but we're trying to start with other people. And so give us the kind of quick overview of Beacon, where it came from, where you guys are, and then we'll dive in.

Sure. So I started Beacon Digital almost five years ago, just a couple months shy of our five year anniversary. After spending about 20 years in various firms on marketing teams, leading marketing teams, mostly on the digital side of things, both B2B companies, B2C companies, tech startups, university, kind of, you name it, a lot of different types of businesses that I had played a role in marketing for and for quite a while I had wanted to start my own agency and had been looking around for someone to do that with and couldn't really find anyone ready to take that leap. So I decided to do it on my own. And yeah, so back in fall of 2016, decided to put out some feelers, see if there were some initial clients I could get on board that would replace my income basically to kind of get me started. But I knew my overall vision was really to grow a business in the Hudson Valley where I lived, so I wouldn't be commuting every day, two hours each way into the city. And the Hudson Valley is a really just a great place to have a business. You can walk to work, bike to work, and just have a great quality of life. And I knew there were others up in the Hudson Valley that probably shared that vision and would love a creative agency to work at in the Hudson Valley as well. So it turned out I made a very good bet on that. I had a couple clients that were willing to sign on just from past engagements and past companies that I'd worked with. And once word got out that I was on my own and started up an agency, phone started to ring, I guess, or the text started to come in, the emails, et cetera. So within the first year we had five employees. By the next year we had 10. Currently we're at about 35 employees and we have nearly 50 clients. So we've really scaled very quickly. We've grown really fast and I think that's a testament to a couple of the markets that we've really focused on. My background, just prior to starting the agency was in risk management, compliance and cybersecurity, which are some pretty complex areas to be doing marketing in, but also very hot when it comes to the business landscape right now. So that's really where our agency focus is. We work primarily with businesses in cybersecurity, financial technology firms, and broadly B2B SaaS technology. But really, that's the core of our business. And yeah, so the demand there is really high and that's really sustained a lot of our growth throughout the pandemic and into 2021. So that's where we're at today.

That's awesome. Do you remember, obviously you remember, what was the job title that you left when you were starting Beacon?

I think it was my global director of digital marketing and strategy for Kroll, which is a global risk management firm.

So I remember. So we worked together last fall, kind of end of last summer and into the fall and going to the site for the first time, you're like, this is a cool niche to be in, but a ton of, I mean everyone says you should be in a niche, but if you go look at the average lead that comes to the website, most of these agencies are not in a specific niche. So was that native, I mean, the first in V1 of Beacon, were you like, hey, I'm going to focus here or did that kind of come out when you realized, hey, I should probably plant my flag somewhere and get more niche?

That's a really good question. I think it kind of came about naturally, but I think for every probably agency owner at the start, you are trying to kind of get a feel for what you're going to do well at and maybe where you do fit best in. And I think we did try out some clients in other areas, you know, took on some, you know, even like a couple local clients, a hotel and a restaurant and things like that. And I think we very quickly found that like we really did need to focus because just for efficiency's sake, you can really do a lot more for your clients if you have a better understanding of their industry. You have a better understanding of the software and technology tools that clients in that industry are typically working in. And so when you can really focus, I just found that the team was just much more efficient and could prioritized a little bit easier. But you know, it's already hard enough I think, going from client to client to client, you know, in the midst of a workday. But when they're also in wildly different industries, it's very hard to kind of flip between all of those different kind of modes of marketing. So that really emerged I think quickly, but you know, it wasn't explicit. I don't think right at the get go that that's how we were going to do it.

That makes sense. And then I know we were just talking about how you don't want to be pigeonholed into being HubSpot partner agency, but I'm going to bring that up anyways. Did you. Were you familiar with HubSpot before Beacon? Was that a quick join to the partner program or did that come about after starting?

That came about after starting. Surprisingly enough. I had had experience with a lot of different marketing automation and CRM platforms prior to starting Beacon Digital from Eloquid, Pardot, you know, Salesforce, I'd implemented across the global enterprise at CROW over the course of many years. Very familiar with that. I knew of HubSpot, but I'd actually never used it prior to starting Beacon Digital. But the first two clients I took on were both HubSpot clients. And so I got to know it very quickly and intimately with those first two clients and really fell in love with it. I was just like, why hadn't I heard of this before or hadn't implemented it before? Because it was just so much easier to use and really found it to be quite delightful in comparison to tools like Pardot. And I actually sought them out in terms of becoming a partner because I was really enjoyed working in the platform and wanted to recommend it to others.

Yep, that makes sense. So working with the Beacon Digital team, from my perspective, and as we were wrapping up together, there was a little bit of a transition with Andrew, my co founder, taking over as we were running into having baby number four show up right at the end. But the thing that stuck out to me and that Andrew and I talked about internally was kind of the. You've got different agency cultures, obviously with any team that you work with. And there's most of the agencies that we work with have people who are problem solvers, but there's certainly teams that you run into that are problem finders and the people who can kind of point out, hey, there's a problem here, versus the teams who are like, hey, here's a problem. I came up with this idea for fixing it, or I think there'd be a way to get around it. And we're both just having a really. We really enjoyed working with the Beacon Digital team because it was a lot of. I didn't even think about this intentionally about our culture until recently as we were recruiting for a couple positions. And it was kind of the first time that we'd intentionally said positivity is a trait that we're looking for. We want people who see a problem and jump in and won't just complain about it. But that was a trait that stuck out from the Beacon Digital team. And so that was kind of in my Mind. And recently I was just thinking back to that after you guys reached the diamond tier with HubSpot. And so when we start with any agency that we're working with, we put them through a team survey. We benchmark those results against other agencies that we've worked with. It's a little over 500 agencies in the database right now. And the Beacon Digital team scored super highly on the questions that are kind of geared around the relationship to the leadership team and the team culture internally. So things around do we have healthy communication habits or is the company leadership barren open to my feedback? Would I recommend this workplace to my friends? Those types of questions. So that's a long winded way of saying where did you. I'm going to ask this in a couple different parts. Did you always have a desire to grow a big team or to grow, like to continue growing the agency at a pretty healthy clip, really? To go from in five years to go from you to 35 people today?

Yeah, that's a really good question. And I am really proud of the fact, I think that our team does have a really great work culture. I think everybody really genuinely does enjoy spending time together and spending time together outside of work as well. We started as a remote first company, so we didn't have an office when we started. So the first probably five or six employees, we never really came to an office together. We met in a co working space once a week or so for half a day just to check in with each other and enjoy some time. But after that we did get an office and I'm currently sitting in a new office that we signed a lease on right before COVID So great timing on that decision. But we've always put a lot of intentionality, and I personally put a lot of intentionality behind the culture of our team. Because for any agency, any consulting business, all you have is the people. That's all we're selling. We're selling our minds, we're selling our ability to solve problems, problems that probably haven't been solved by anyone else on your team or any other agency that you've had before. So the people really are the core of the business of who we are as a company. And for any person to be productive and happy and do their best work, that takes a lot of intentionality with the work, that culture that you provide. I think we've all been in workplaces where we didn't feel particularly valued. We didn't. We felt underutilized. We felt like our manager probably didn't care. We were smarter than our manager and why are they my boss? And you know, all sorts of situations that, you know, we've been in that were, you know, kind of distracting to us, doing our best work or feeling like we wanted to put that forward. So that's always been at the front and center of like, how do we intentionally do this month after month? And sometimes we'll make mistakes, sometimes we will make mistakes, we'll make hire. Maybe that doesn't fit that culture, but we do really try to be intentional about that when we interview for people. Positivity, positive attitude. Attitude is like 90% of everything. I would gladly have a. A person with a positive attitude is ready to solve a problem on the team versus someone who's super smart but kind of a jerk. And I think we've all read that book about those hiring choices. You see that play out over and over again. The positivity really matters on our team.

What are the intentional. What are the habits that you have in terms of working with the team right now? So some specific examples like does your team have weekly one on ones or bi weekly one on ones? Are you doing quarterly performance reviews or how are people knowing, I guess, how they progress through the company or what are the main channels of communication from an individual contributor level to manager or leadership level?

Yeah. Well, as you grow, all of this changes very quickly. At the get go, when you have five employees or two employees, it can be a whole lot more one on one and also organic in terms of how you're working with someone and they're getting a lot of personal one on one time with you as the founder of the company, when you're two to three people. But as you grow, you can really do that less and less. I don't spend one on one time, unfortunately, with every single person on our team anymore. And that's kind of sad. I wish I could. That would be a great day. But what we do try to do is continue to scale what we can. So it's doing one on one meetings every week with our direct reports. And it's not about necessarily getting the work done. It's about checking in with people. How are you doing, particularly over the course of the last year and a half, making sure that we had time for those conversations of how are you doing really? And what can we do to help? And I really made a commitment over the course of the last year and really actually all throughout our company that as soon as we can offer benefits to people, as soon as we can make better contributions to benefits or perks, or vacation time or things like that, we're 100% going to do it because it's the people that matter we have to retain and make happy. Really, this team that we've brought together, and we would hate to lose anybody over a small thing that we could have done to keep them. So, you know, I think being really proactive about what we can do from a benefits and rewards standpoint has been important. So as soon as we could offer healthcare, we did it. As soon as we could offer parental leave policies, we did it. And pretty generous for companies our size. From other agencies I've talked to, for better or worse, we just actually announced that we were going to do another week off of vacation starting next year for the fourth of July, which HubSpot announced the week prior. We're like, that's a great idea. We're going to plan for that too and extend that to the team. And I think that was really well received by the team because we're just looking for those opportunities all the time.

I don't know if I've had any conversations about guests intentionally about what the benefits are. So do you mind sharing any of the specifics on benefits? Yeah, by specifics I mean, so when you say another week off, do you take the week around Christmas off as a company?

We do. We take the week between Christmas and New Year's is off for everybody. So that's a given. But you also get three weeks on top of that. And then we just added another week off. So really everybody's getting five weeks of paid vacation.

That's a lot in the agency space.

Yeah, it is. But like I said, it's about the people.

Unlimited vacation.

Yes. Other than the unlimited vacation policies, which I sort of have a love hate with, I think a lot of people feel like that's a good idea and there's probably good ways to implement it. The downside that we often hear is that then people don't use it because they feel shamed into, like, not doing it sometimes. So I really want people to use the vacation. I do not want people to get burned out. So it is use it or lose it, but you better use it.

And then when you said parental leave policy, if you're open to sharing with that looks like I'd love to hear it.

Yeah. So this was, I think, a challenging one, but one that was really important to us because a lot of the folks initially that we were hiring actually specifically requested that they knew they wanted to have children within the first couple of couple years and was like What, I'm not going to come here unless you have a parental leave policy. So. And that was important enough that we were like, okay, well, let's figure out how to do that. So we took a look around and, you know, compared what options were kind of what you. What the requirements are, of course, which are very minimal in the United States in terms of what's actually required, and decided that as a company that really is trying to attract and employ top talent, a lot of whom are women, a lot of whom are going to be in their 20s and 30s, that's just kind of the demographic of who a lot of our top candidates are. That we wanted that to be an important part of our program. So I don't want to say anything incorrectly, but I believe actually right now we've made some slight modifications to it. But it is a very generous policy. I think. I think it's six weeks right now of paid time off, and then also with the option of flex time on the back end of that. And there's always extenuating, you know, there's extenuating circumstances that come with anything that can. That can come up. So we've always been a very flexible and understanding workforce. So whatever folks need, we'll figure out how to accommodate. But that is an expensive.

Yeah.

Endeavor. When you have employees in 10 states, you're not paying disability insurance and necessarily, you know, all those places because you're not required to. But it does pose some challenges then when, you know, employees need to take advantage of that parental leave policy, but they're not necessarily in your home state of New York.

Right. That makes sense. Trying to think if there's anything else I bumped into, I would imagine at some point, obviously working with European agencies, that's just a given, either 10 weeks or whatever, and that's all covered.

But, yeah, it's quite challenging. Like, when we, you know, talk to our European clients mostly, like, we don't necessarily work with as many, like, agency partners abroad. But, yeah, it's interesting to compare. Like, well, we just get a year off. What do you mean you get a year off? Yeah, it is.

Well, it's like, I remember my first when we built a software product, a project management tool for agencies called Do Inbound, way back in 2013 and that winter, as we were selling it and talking to people in Australia or wherever. This is a great call. Talking in middle of December or something. This is a great call. Let's follow up in a month. You mean beginning of January, after Christmas. And they're like, no, actually A full month because. Yeah, we're just off for the first summer selling to European, going on holiday. Oh, great. So you'll be gone for a week. No, no, no, it's a month. Very different. And you've probably heard this too from folks, but I've had multiple people ask. So are the stereotypes true? You Americans live to work and we work to live. Just kind of the different mindset it is.

Yeah, we have. Our head of web production is actually based in Austria. She's American but moved to Austria with her husband. And that's actually just been interesting too. You know, just trying to align like calendars, like her holiday schedule and like with the Austrian, you know, holiday calendar is like. Well, it's a lot more holidays than we get in the US So how do we.

Right. Yeah. What do you do?

Gotta make us equal.

Yeah.

So that's actually fun to balance out.

So a couple things. One you're. And obviously when this goes live, which would be a couple weeks out from when we're recording it, but you're hiring presumably for positions you'll continue hiring for, but hiring for account managers primarily right now, one of the main roles. Okay, cool. Folks who are interested in potentially working at Beacon, not specifically for six weeks of parental leave hurts, but hopefully not the main driver. What do you. Is it jobs? Beacondigitalmarketing.com careers or what's the. Where do people go to apply?

Probably beacondigitalmarketing.com careers. I think that's our careers page. Yeah, you'll find all of our wonderful listings there. I mentioned to you earlier, we've hired 10 people already this year, so it's been a productive start to the year. But you know, demand continues and we're looking to add some additional capacity to take on a few more clients towards the end of the year. So looking for some really awesome folks who want to manage those relationships and help people solve their digital marketing challenges as a lead account manager. So it's a fun role. It's one of the most critical roles on the team and I think also most, to me it's most rewarding. I did a lot of this and still do a lot of the account management within our team from the oversight.

I just double checked it is slash careers. So the one other piece I wanted to ask you about because you're mentioning to me some strategically direction. So over the next year in terms of where you take the agency, obviously there's going to be some growth team clients, all the paranormal agency stuff. But in terms of where you Go from a focus perspective and positioning perspective. What are you looking at there as you're looking forward into the future for Beacon Digital?

Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question and probably one that agency owners are asking themselves all the time. And I think for our vision and what I really see as a need in the market, what I would like to really try to solve for is you need to have really a unified go to market team for B2B companies. And there's a lot of bifurcation in the different teams and agencies that clients have to bring on and manage how they all work together, oftentimes with very little internal resources. So for example, a typical client that we might work with brings on not only a digital agency to help with the lead generation pipeline and content production, standing up a tool like HubSpot, sending out email marketing and running your ad campaigns, but then they also bring on a PR agency to help them with the sort of top of the funnel awareness generation, brand creation, positioning, messaging strategies around their company. And then they'll also bring on sometimes a B2B appointment setting market research firm or lead development agency that's actually qualifying, booking meetings for their, for their sales teams or whoever is taking actual sales calls and giving demos or taking those platforms. And I'd really like to bring that all together for our clients and give them sort of a single go to market company that they can go to that is effective and accountable and can take them not only from the strategy, from the business strategy side of what are all the pieces we need to really go to market effectively, but we can do all the execution along with it and tie it together.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. The model of saying we can be more of, and you're growing into the size too, where you can legitimately be more of the one stop shop type of firm for a specific vertical. And I think what's cool about your journey, this goes back to one of the principles that Andrew and I have kind of had for a long time, which is like earn the right where you weren't doing everything out of the gate and it's growing and evolving kind of as you go, but you kind of earn the right to, hey, we got good at this. We can add on the next service, we can add on the next service and layer in. So that's been cool to see as part of the journey as well.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think we're, we're also nimble and responsive to what we're hearing from clients. And so part of the reason for that trajectory really is coming from what I hear and what problems I'm trying to solve for our clients because they're struggling with. Where do I put this budget? Where do I put that budget? Managing all these different contracts and relationships, coordinating meetings between different agencies that need to be talking to each other Ultimately, you know, when I was thinking about starting Beacon Digital and really, you know, at first trying to like carve out what services do I want to offer, really, it was around trying to be an agency that I wish I would have, would have, could have had when I was an in house marketer. And that was always my vision. It's like what, what agency would I have wanted to hire or come to the table? How would I have wanted them to pitch themselves and present themselves? What value propositions would have made sense to me? My leadership at the time? And I think that's been a good lens to look at it through.

That makes a lot of sense. Awesome. Well, I've got a lot of other places I could go, but this is great for round one. So beacondigitalmarketing.com is a site anywhere else you'd want to point people from here? Whitney.

That'S a really great question. I wasn't prepared for that one. Our Instagram channel is amazing. Great pictures of Beacon. So I would go there.

I'm not cool enough for Instagram, but everyone is listening in, so I'm not. I'm the one, the one lone one. Awesome. Cool. Well, we'll put both those links in the show notes. Whitney, thanks for coming on. This is a blast. Thanks for joining.

Awesome. Thanks so much for having me.

Greg, thanks for listening to the Agency Journey podcast. Visit agencyjourneyinsiders.com to join the podcast community and be sure to subscribe for future episodes.