A few years into running my own agency, we were at around 25-30 people and growing nicely. At around this size, teams and managers start to break out so leadership starts to cascade down the agency.
This means that sub-cultures start to appear and each team can start to go in its own direction a bit. Whilst we didn’t experience huge problems with this (at first!) I could see that we needed to ensure that all teams were aligned as much as possible. It was fine for each team to be slightly different in how they operated, but they needed some common ground.
The one concrete impact of getting this wrong is that clients who work with different teams will feel like they’re working with different agencies. This isn’t good for you.
So, the advice that I was given (and to be fair, had read about in far too many business books) was to put the classic mission, vision and values work in place.
Putting mission, vision and values in place
The process took a while and involved my co-founder and my two senior team members.
I’ll be honest, despite being the one who believed most in this side of things and its value to the business, I really struggled.
Not only did I struggle to come up with the words that seemed to complete the exercise, I struggled to believe in the value of those words.
I just couldn’t imagine how these words would change how we worked together day-to-day and now it would actually align our teams.
But we cracked on and eventually, after lots of discussion and locking ourselves in a room multiple times to figure it out, we got there.
And day-to-day, it didn’t change much.
That’s not a dig at the exercise. It’s the advice founders often get when the agency starts to feel like it’s pulling in different directions. Get clear on why you exist, where you’re heading and what you stand for, then unite everyone behind it.
It’s reasonable advice. I followed it. It just solves a much smaller part of the problem than people think. On reflection, this was what my instinct was telling me with the concerns that I mentioned earlier but I wasn’t experienced enough to know what it actually meant.
What mission, vision and values actually do
A good mission statement tells people what you believe and where you’re heading. That’s useful. It gives the agency a shared language and something to point back to. It can help in a bunch of ways.
For example, at the strategic level (where you’re probably operating) it can help with decision making. So the question of “should do this big thing or that big thing” can be helped by an overarching mission and direction. It can shape long-term strategy and the areas that you focus on and be a reminder of what they’re trying to do at a high level.
What it doesn’t do is change anyone’s actual day-to-day goals, what gets reported or how the work actually gets done at the team level.
And those are the things that decide whether an agency is aligned and most importantly, whether you’re delivering great work for clients or not.
If the founders, the senior team and everyone else are working towards different goals, reporting on different things and working in different ways, a shared purpose sits on top of all of that without touching any of it in a practical way. Everyone can agree with the values and still spend their week pulling in different directions.
What misalignment looks like (with the values in place)
I’ve seen the same pattern at agencies I work with during the years that have followed.
At one of them, the founders, the senior team and the rest of the company weren’t aligned at all. Not around goals and not around ways of working either.
The person who saw it most clearly was the one stuck in the middle. They were passing communication back and forth between the founders and the team and that put them in a position to see that the two sides were working and thinking in different ways.
When one person’s job has quietly become translating between two halves of the same agency, that’s a sign the halves aren’t pointed at the same thing.
Mission, vision and values statements don’t fix this.
The one goal everyone can share
So, what does fix it?
Common goals, common reporting and common ways of working. And at an agency, this is actually quite simple. It’s so simple that when I tell clients this, I can feel the scepticism and a bit of resistance before they’ve even responded.
You align everyone around retaining clients. That’s it.
It’s the one goal that everyone should care about first and foremost, because it’s the foundation of an agency’s success. Everything the founder worries about rests on it, from revenue and margin to growth. Even an effective new business operation becomes far less effective when you’re losing clients.
And unlike a mission statement, it’s something every person in the team affects every single day.
As I said to one client on a call recently when they were asking about how to brief their team and keep them focused on what matters, I said:
“Just don’t f**king lose clients”.
Of course, their wording to the team was different! But I deliberately swore to emphasise the point here and drill home the clarity and importance of this simple idea. And yes, doing this in reality is hard and there are a bunch of variables that affect whether you keep or lose clients. But the point is the same – this should be your core focus and the team needs to understand that everything revolves around this single goal.
What to actually do
Retention as a goal is only the top layer. The useful part is what it cascades into – and this is the bit that mission, vision and values don’t do.
Once retention is the goal, you have to look properly at everything that makes a client happy and gets good work delivered to them. In my experience, that usually comes down to a combination of three things:
1) Results
The actual performance the client is paying you for. It should go without saying but I can bet that at least half of you reading this don’t have clear KPIs for clients and / or don’t track those goals each month.
2) The relationship
How the client feels about working with you and the people they deal with. A strong relationship is important for getting things done on the account but it can also get you through times when results perhaps aren’t where they should be.
3) Delivery
Doing the work you said you would do, to a high standard – every time. At the most basic level, this is about ensuring that you deliver what is in your contract / statement of work. Again, this is easy to forget about once a project kicks off.
Then build your goals, your reporting and your ways of working around those three things, for everyone from the founders down. For the client I mentioned earlier who was “stuck in the middle” we built:
- A core set of goals that united all teams.
- Several tracking dashboards that were customised for each team but contained common data points that they shared – these were mostly focused on client retention.
- A cadence of meetings / check-ins where these numbers were discussed which meant that different teams were talking about the same core goals.
This is the part a mission statement can’t reach. The values describe the kind of agency you want to be and how you work with each other. The shared goal decides what everyone actually works on this week and every person in the team can see which part of it they move.
I’m not saying that mission statements are worthless
This isn’t me saying mission, vision and values are pointless. They’re a reasonable starting point. They just aren’t the fix on their own and need to be accompanied by the tangible goals that cascade down to the day-to-day reality too.
It’s also worth calling out that if most of your work is one-off projects rather than ongoing retainers, “retention” needs translating. The question becomes how often a project turns into an ongoing relationship and multiple projects.
And sometimes the gap isn’t about goals at all. If people genuinely disagree about where the agency is heading, that’s a different conversation and a shared goal won’t paper over it. Have that conversation instead.
Ultimately – start with clients and how to ensure that you’re doing the best possible job for them.
We did the mission, vision and values work and the day-to-day carried on much as before.
If I were doing it again, I’d start with the one goal everyone could act on and build the processes, reporting and the ways of working around it.
Start with the clients. Everything else gets easier when you get that right.
