Jesse Pujji argues agencies sell their people, not their services. Ampush built a "talent refinery" that trains quantitative hires through feedback, Excel, Facebook ads, and increasing responsibility. Without deliberate talent development, agencies lose their best people to startups.
I think a lot of agencies don't realize their product is not the marketing service they offer. Their product is the talent.
I've been obviously talking to agency owners. A couple have said that one of the problems with agencies now is that the really good people end up just breaking off and going and starting their own businesses. What do you do about that?
At Ampush, we got extremely good at manufacturing very high-quality talent. You give me the raw material of a really bright, motivated person who's pretty quantitative, and I take them and I put them through my refinery. My refinery, you know, gives them feedback, it teaches them Excel, it gives them Facebook things, it makes them— gives them a lot of responsibility, and it slowly converts them from a raw material into a finished good. And I can do it all day long. People running agencies, if they want them to be big and scale, they have to get really excited about talent development and talent. They have to take it really, really seriously. If you're in a services business, your product is literally people. So you have to get good at creating those people.
