The Handbook: The Operations Podcast

Trenton Moss: 3 high-impact strategies that redefined my agency

• Harv Nagra • Season 1 • Episode 14

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Curious about how an agency experimented with new approaches and found their recipe for success?

In this episode, we talk with Trenton Moss, a former agency owner who ran his business for 15 years before it was sold. Trenton shares the key decisions that transformed his agency, along with some missteps along the way.

Trenton covers three major changes he implemented and explains exactly how he did it:

  • Setting up team pods with a highly effective reward system
  • Developing ongoing client services training and putting the learnings into practice
  • Creating an advisory board to guide the agency


Trenton shares plenty of inspiring stories and practical tactics you can apply in your own agency.

Now a leadership coach, Trenton has been coaching and training teams for nearly 20 years. You can check out his website, Sterka, his book Human Powered, you can also subscribe to Human Powered: The Podcast via his website.


Follow Trenton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trentonmoss/ 

Follow Harv on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvnagra/

Stay up to date with regular ops insights. Subscribe to The Handbook: The Operations Newsletter.

This podcast is brought to you by Scoro, where you can manage your projects, resources and finances in a single system.

Harv:

Before we get into the interview, as you know, this podcast is brought to you by Scoro. Scoro is an agency platform that brings together your quoting, task, time, and budget tracking, your invoicing, and your agency reporting into one place. One reason I brought Scoro into my past agency was because we were a multi entity business. We had different agencies in different countries and we needed a common platform that allowed us all to collaborate across the group and have a single place where all our group reporting was done. So it made it really efficient for finance, operations and all the people in the team to collaborate. You can sign up for a free trial at scoro.Com or drop me a note on LinkedIn and I'd love to tell you about my experiences and why my team loved using Scoro. Now, back to the episode. Hi all. Welcome back to the podcast. Those of us in Ops, we remember those big transformative projects we undertook over the course of our careers that taught us plenty of lessons and gave our agencies a big boost. One that I was heavily involved in prior to formally moving into Ops was bringing in our first PSA, professional services automation platform. We were taking our agency from ad hoc working to consistency across the organization with documented procedures. The other big career milestone and learning experience for me was a bigger transformation program that aimed to take us to a whole new stage of maturity. It included system changes, process changes, organizational structural changes, and greater accountability across the board. Over the course of 12 to 18 months, we were running like a whole new business. Well, today we're going to talk to someone with a great deal of experience that did some big things at his own past agency that had a massive impact on their culture and on their revenues. Our guest today is Trenton Moss. Trenton is an agency leadership coach who has been coaching and training teams for nearly 20 years. And he's got plenty of experience in the agency space. In fact, he founded his own digital experience agency and ran it for 15 years before it was acquired and he exited. He's written a best selling book called Human Powered, which talks about supercharging teams with people skills and emotional intelligence, and has a podcast by the same name. Trenton's got a wealth of experience he's gained over the course of his career, Which he now uses to support other agencies through his consultancy, Team Sterka. I'm always excited for you to listen to the conversations in the podcast, but I can't tell you how inspired I was after talking to Trenton for this episode. I was buzzing. I'm excited for you to hear this, so let's get into it. Trenton, welcome to the podcast and thank you for joining us today.

Trenton Moss:

Thank you so much for having me.

Harv:

I'd love to start with a bit about your background in the agency space. Can you tell us about that?

Trenton Moss:

Yeah, sure. So, I've been working in the agency space for about 20 years now. So, I started my agency about 20 years ago. And I ran it for about 15 years. And managed to kind of keep it going through all the ups and downs.

Harv:

Hmm.

Trenton Moss:

After, a rollercoaster ride of around 15 years we were acquired and I exited a year or two later.

Harv:

And then is that where you went into consulting?

Trenton Moss:

Yeah, so after I exited... I was, well, after we sold and I was trying to think, well, what do I do next? And one, and when you're running an agency, it just feels like a litany of failure, right? Like it just, you're constantly trying to do things. You're having to balance everything. And it just feels like you're failing all the time. And I reckon I did about three things that were quite successful. And one of those things that was quite successful. So what's that like an average of one every five years. So one of those things that was quite successful was a client leadership program, that I launched within the agency. we kind of launched on a bit of a whim and, and ended up being transformative. We got an uplifting revenue of about 35 percent from our clients. when I was leaving and I was trying to figure out what next, and I was chatting to, you know, agency buddies of mine, and it turns out everyone has the same problem that when it comes to upselling to clients or, you know, trying to reduce unbillable work or trying to inspire your clients or having to interact with a senior stakeholder, usually someone from your senior team has to get involved in those moments that matter. And, we solved that problem in my agency through our client leadership program. And so after I left, I decided to set that up for other agencies. So that's what I've been doing for the last four years. And I now run that program for other agencies.

Harv:

We're going to be talking about some of that and some of the, the kind of things that you've learned along the way that the rest of us can learn from. Before we do that, just a bit more about you and your experience. You know, I've been following you on LinkedIn for a while and you, I find, very refreshingly tell some very honest stories about the challenges you faced over the course of your career. I was looking over your LinkedIn profile the other day and I noticed that in one of your highlights on your profile, you had highlighted actually a failure, which was trying to launch your agency in the U S. I thought that was super interesting. Why do you find it important to talk about these things when everyone else is talking about winning?

Trenton Moss:

Well, I mean, no one's winning all the time right? So, you know, it's nice to... It's nice to post on social media and LinkedIn about the good things that are going on and the nice things happening, but I don't know. It's also, let's be realistic here and there's highs and lows for all of us. And you know, the things that go wrong, cannot, you know, everything that you do in life, you've got to kind of look for, you know, how was this a wonderful gift for me? So, you know, for us kind of trying to launch in New York and losing hundreds of thousands of pounds and failing. you know, that's a bit annoying. you know, we had a bit of a journey doing it and it was an experience and, you know, I, and we learned a lot by doing that. So there's still a lot of positives in it, even if, you know, it didn't actually achieve its goal.

Harv:

We are talking to operations people and lessons learned, so if you don't mind me stopping there just for a moment, what went wrong with the U S expansion, if you can share anything. Is there anything that comes to mind that you can tell us?

Trenton Moss:

Yeah. So it was, we, we, we were working with a client in the UK and, and the US and New York. So we were Kind of going out to New York a bit with them and from chatting to them and then like doing a bit of research, it turned out it looked like there was a real gap in the market for what we did. So we were a kind of pure play user experience, UX agency, very, very much on the kind of strategy and research side of things. And no one out there was really doing what we did. It was just... you know, from everyone we were chatting to, there was just no one doing it. So we were like, right, there's a gap in the market here. And the, the work we were doing with our client was just a small, discreet piece of work. So that finished and we were like, right, well we could, you know, let's try launching in New York because here in the UK, you know, we do a whole bunch of marketing and new business activities and that generates clients. And then, you know, we have a client servicing function that then kind of like, you know, it keeps those clients going and you know, that's obviously how an agency run. So we thought, well, you know, we just do the same in New York. So we thought we'd launch with like our training. We had a training academy. So we thought we'd launch with training as well. So we hired some local sales and marketing people and got going and the thing that, that we forgot or didn't really think about was here in the UK, our, our, the engine that drives revenue into the business had, I think, around 10 years worth of track record, worth of recognition in the market, worth of brand. And when you go into a new market, in our case, you know, America and New York, we had nothing. We were basically just a startup, a nobody. No one had heard of us. Our credibility counted for nothing. it was after a while that we kind of realized. Yeah, we're basically just a startup. And here in the UK, we've got this huge amount of brand equity that drives us forward and the momentum we've gathered over 10 years, and we just took for granted that momentum and didn't really think that it didn't even realize it existed until before then. So launching in America, we were, ended up pumping in a couple of hundred grand, I think. And we maybe made back about 20 grand. It's also, it was a big distraction because obviously, you know, it's the shiny thing over there. we've got the kind of UK operation here, but look, there's America. and so it was a bit distracting and it meant that we started actually running at a small loss in the UK. Cause we kind of took our eye off the ball here. We were really flying at the time. And so that distraction kind of like, like impacted the business a bit here. So after a while we were like, we just can't continue like this. This isn't working. So we pulled the plug. The other thing is, is that with all these things, ideas are cheap and execution is extremely hard. So a good idea to launch in New York. It was a good idea.

Harv:

Mm hmm.

Trenton Moss:

There was a gap in the market for us. The, the hard thing isn't coming up with the idea. The hard thing is executing it. And once the reality of kind of like, you know, flying back, flying over there and then back on the red eye and the jet lag, and,

Harv:

Mm.

Trenton Moss:

Staying in like Airbnbs or hotels, the reality, when the reality kicks in. It's a bit less exciting.

Harv:

And, last question on that story, you know, if you were to do it again, well, is the lesson that, you wouldn't have done it or you would have changed something about your approach then?

Trenton Moss:

I would have made sure we had a client out there on a, an ongoing basis. So the client we work with was, it was very much a one-off thing. It was always gonna be a one-off thing. I would've made sure we had a decent, meaty, chunky client out there. With at least a six month run rate and all the profit from that, we could then funnel into trying to acquire other clients. And if that had worked, then we could have kept going. And if it didn't, then we would have stopped, but you know, nothing gained, nothing lost.

Harv:

So we'd been chatting beforehand and we were, we were kind of going over three key lessons or maybe stories that we're, we're going to go into with yourself today. So, yeah, let's, let's get started.

Trenton Moss:

Okay, great. Well, I think one of them we were going to talk about. How to get your whole team to be a client superstar. So we, we really doubled down on this. We, we had a bit of a problem because as a user experience or UX specialist, we were very niche for quite some time. And then all of a sudden UX went very, very mainstream. And that meant we were now competing with the likes of Accenture and IBM, and we were pitching against Accenture and IBM. So we knew we had to up the ante and, you know, the big consultancies, they're the masters of land and expand and us agencies we're kind of like the masters of our craft and being passionate about our craft, but when it comes to kind of that commercial mindedness, it's not, it's not as much part of our DNA in the way that it is for the big consultancies. So we knew we had to do something about it. So, so we tried a few things. We really wanted to kind of motivate the team around like, you know, all of us are responsible here for the commercial success of the business. So one of the one of the first things we tried actually we tried so we did a profit, we launched a profit share thinking like okay, that's going to be good, that's going to help getting people thinking about you know, how do we make sure the company's more successful. Big, biggest disaster ever?

Harv:

Really?

Trenton Moss:

Yeah, yeah, it was like a huge failure. So... So we launched a profit share, and a few months later, we were doing so well, we were smashing all of our targets and, and you could already see, we were going to hit our targets for the year, even a few months in, we were doing so, so well that there would have to be the most enormous disaster for us not to hit those targets. And when we did hit them, so, we, we, we, we, we hit them and it paid out, but even then it was still a massive disaster. And the problem is it with profit shares, I find there's loads of problems. So, first problem is that everyone just fixates on the amount they're going to get, and then eventually that amount just becomes normal and it becomes an expectation. So then if you hit your target, which we did, and there's a payout, no one's any happier. They're just getting what they expected. So the best you can do is, is nothing. And the worst you can do in that is annoy people because you didn't hit your target and they didn't get their payout. So that wasn't great. And then like people just got kind of furious with us after we launched it because they were saying, and I get this, they were saying, We work really hard and we're really passionate about what we do. So what, are you saying that you need to dangle this like carrot of like money in front of us, for us to kind of work a bit harder? So they didn't like that. Obviously we weren't saying that. And then like, because there was this profit share, everyone started, it brings the word profit front and center of the conversations. So everyone starts speculating how much that the leadership in the agency are taking home, because we all know that if you're running an agency, that's the path to riches, like, yeah, that's the way you get like mega salaries, you know, the leadership of a small agency.

Harv:

Uh huh.

Trenton Moss:

it didn't do very well for us. And the other thing is it, it didn't, it didn't work even though like, okay. So putting all of that aside, you know, our aim here was to get people to be motivated, to help with a commercial side of the business. And it didn't work because here's the thing, when it comes to something like a profit share, no one person can really influence it. No one's changing their behavior. So we tried something different instead. So, you know, we were like, right, well, how can we motivate people to kind of think more about the commercial sizing? Yeah. We always shared our financials every, every monthly meeting. We were sharing financials. Yeah. We'd explain to people what the difference between revenue and profit is, which, you know, for many of us, it's like, what? You need to explain it. But yes, you do. Everyone has to go on that learning curve to understand how finances work. after we binned the profit share, we launched, the WMIF and the WMIF was really successful.

Harv:

Okay.

Trenton Moss:

This went on for years cause it worked so well. So the WMIF was the, the, We Made It Fund or W M I F or WMIF.

Harv:

Okay.

Trenton Moss:

And it's basically, it's a fund that you get access to when you finish a client engagement or for a retainer, like, like at the end of each month, like, well, we made it. Yay.

Harv:

Mm.

Trenton Moss:

And you got access to a fund that was equal to a one third of one percent of the client spend.

Harv:

Okay.

Trenton Moss:

If the client spent a hundred grand, you'd get access to Three, no, 300 pounds, 333 pounds. If a client spent a hundred, a hundred grand, you didn't, you didn't actually get that money though.

Harv:

Mm hmm.

Trenton Moss:

You got access to spend that money. And so the teams would spend that money on, you know, maybe if it was a small thing, then they just got to the, for a few drinks, you know. Maybe a couple of drinks with the money. Or if it was a bit bigger, they could go out for dinner together. And then what started happening was people would like get together and pool their monies and start saving up, for like more interesting experiences. And they'd go out to the theater or they'd go out to do like a crystal maze experience. And so this was really great for morale, but what it also did is it achieved our original goal in, insofar as people were now talking about how they could get opportunities to get more work from clients so as to generate more money so they could then go to the crystal maze. They'd be sitting together saying, right, we need to, we've got another 70k forecast for this client, but we need to get it up to about 100k so that we can do our activity together. What are our, what are our opportunities?

Harv:

Right.

Trenton Moss:

It was so successful. And I think the reason it was so successful was that people could tie back their reward to something they did. Whereas with the profit share is like, well, I don't really influence that. Whereas with the, with the WMIF, they did, you know, they did the work, and the client was happ y. It was also an experience and money in the bank isn't particularly motivating people. It's nice, but doesn't create like a long lasting memory in the same way of going to the theater and going for dinner and going for the crystal maze. These are nice experiences that you're having with your team that you're associating with the company. But also like the kind of, just the group, the group being in charge of it, and they're kind of bringing the team together. So that, so the WMIF was really successful, and we did that at the same time as, reorging as well. And we, we reorged into a pod structure, and, and again, the specific goal of this was to raise people's commercial understanding of what it takes to run the business and to motivate them to want to help with the business succeeding, because look, we had, you know, company values and a defined company culture and a way of being. And we had a vision that was all around the services that we deliver. And everyone's passionate about what we do, ultimately if you don't make profit, none of that matters because if you run at a loss every month, you will eventually go out of business and all of that lovely, nice stuff. Well, it's gone. So, you know, it's important that people realize this, that there's, there is all this lovely, nice stuff. And that is key. But ultimately what underpins that is us making profit. So moving to a pod structure was along with the WMIF just, just revolutionized the agency.

Harv:

Uh huh. Amazing.

Trenton Moss:

What you had previously in terms of our, our practitioners, you know, the people doing the work, they were so passionate about the work and so, you know, frankly, brilliant at what they did. but you know, weren't so great at selling in their work to clients necessarily, because they just get too bogged down in the detail. And, you know, in terms of like having difficult conversations with clients, avoiding unbillable time, inspiring clients, getting your work signed off quickly, upselling, again, they weren't as good as what we'd like them to be. And they weren't focused on that. They weren't interested in that. And by moving into a pod structure where we had about almost 15 people in each pod, these were all autonomous businesses, it exposed everyone there into basically running the business, running that pod business. I would say it shifted the dial for many of our delivery people from focusing a hundred percent of their brain space, just on delivery and the work to maybe 95%. And that other 5 percent was on the commercial side of things. And that was a, for many of them, that was a big enough shift. And just for them being part of that team, in that pod that is trying to like be a successful business, just, just changed everything. And all the pods had, the two pods had targets around revenue, and a few other things. And then the revenue target then got broken down into, right, here's all the people in your pod, and here's everyone's billable, here's everyone's, day rate. And so here's roughly how much billable time we all need to do. And everyone, everyone could see that. So they could understand how we got to those revenue targets and, you know, roughly like what everyone needed to contribute to get there. So that was really, really great. You know, we had all of that information available anyway, but it wasn't kind of, it was just presented to everyone every month in the, in the all hands. Whereas by being in the pod, they were, kind of that information was part of them helping to run the business. so it was really game changing. So yeah, targets around revenue, targets around client satisfaction, targets around team happiness. Cause we wanted the team to be happy, obviously, and targets around supporting our marketing new biz function, because that's the outside of the pods. So, the pods were hugely successful. The pods and the WMIF together gave people the motivation to contribute to the commercial success of the business. And then our training program, gave people the skills. So those two together were game changers. So we started this, we started a client skills training program, which which now is my job essentially, and it was hugely successful. We did team training everyone together half an hour every friday morning 9 to 930 you had to be there. Three reasons you could not be there and those reasons were i'm sick, I'm on holiday. I'm dead.

Harv:

Okay.

Trenton Moss:

You couldn't be at a pitch, you couldn't be with a client, you couldn't be running research, you couldn't, and the same for me, I couldn't do it, I had to lead by example, all of us had to be there.

Harv:

Mm

Trenton Moss:

there's, there's something called the forgetting curve.

Harv:

Hmm.

Trenton Moss:

Which is basically like, like a curve that just shows how over time, you forget what you learn. So you do a learning intervention and over time the curve comes down. So if you're watching this, you can see my finger. And if you're listening to this, well, my finger is basically coming down in a curve.

Harv:

Yep.

Trenton Moss:

it just shows like how much you remember. And that goes down to zero over time. But if you do one or two or three reviews of what you've learned. Very quickly, then what happens is you start to remember and that forgetting curve comes down much flatter until you basically remember it.

Harv:

Right.

Trenton Moss:

So our training program was all around the forgetting curve, and it was basically only half an hour every week. this is just one learning outcome and it was all around every single aspect of client relationships.

Harv:

Mm

Trenton Moss:

And we repeated it. We built on it. We kept it going and we kept the conversation going in between sessions. We, everything we were teaching, we then like, integrated into all of our processes. So all of our PDPs had around all of these skills that we expected people to have, we documented what that looked like. And put it into PDPs. We created guides, to define everything that we did. So like an overarching kind of client experience guide, a guide for how you do meetings, a guide how you do presentations and so on and so on. And again, these got integrated into our processes. So our operational people are, what we call experience directors. The kind of most senior people in accounts, our PMs. Every day, they were, they were in charge of making sure this stuff's happening. We had checklists that you you kind of went through. When a pilot gets on an airplane and is ready to take off, even if that pilot has flown 20, 000 times before they open up that book and they go through that checklist one by one, even though they, you know, probably could repeat, could say it in Chinese or say it backwards. They've done it so many times. and we, it was the same kind of principle, just constantly drilling this stuff into people. all of this worked 35 percent uplift in revenue with our clients the next year. It was mad how successful this was. But it was so much more than that. It wasn't just about revenue. It, our culture flourished as well off the back of this.

Harv:

Mm

Trenton Moss:

Because all of this, people really felt like we were investing in them because all of this, this was all a huge effort doing all of this. And we're always very transparent about why we were doing it and you know, how we think it's going to benefit all of us. And especially with the training, because all the training was around emotional intelligence and people skills. So, you know, we're applying it to client situations, but all of these skills you could use with whoever you want. So everyone starts using these skills with each other. So, you know, in terms of like, you know, when people are working on client engagements together and maybe not agreeing on something, they now have the tools to have difficult conversations with each other and they would go home and like, use these skills with, with their wives and husbands and kids and housemates, it was bonkers. so our culture absolutely flourished. And when I, when I left, I ended up leaving the agency before most people in it. And I got a few just really lovely messages from people who'd been around for a few years, who just talked about the transformation they'd been on in Webcredible, my agency, as a result of all of this, we'd invested in everyone. And when you're running an agency, like, you know, yeah, of course, you know, you want to grow and you want to get a good profit and you want to be kind of commercially successful, but that's like a fleeting bit of happiness.

Harv:

hmm.

Trenton Moss:

the, the, the really deep seated happiness is when someone says to you, thank you so much. I've learned so much. I've developed so much as a person, is that, which like, that's what you remember. And that's when you're like, Oh, it wasn't worth it. Because when you're running a business, it often doesn't feel like it's all worth it because you're just getting a lot of hassle and issues thrown at you from every single angle all the time relentlessly. So when you have moments like that where someone's just like, thank you so much, I've grown as a person and it's because of you, you remember that forever.

Harv:

That is amazing, that story and so interesting, super inspiring. A few comments or observations and questions as well. First of all, all of the approaches you talked about, were they your own ideas? Did you get external advice? Did you see something or read something? Where did that come from?

Trenton Moss:

To be honest, we, we got a little bit of external helping, but I'd say 5%. The vast majority was, was us because like, you know, us as a leadership team, we've got a lot of experience, right. And we're generally think we're quite good with clients. I've also got quite a bit of, a background with counseling and Samaritans with coaching so we could bring a lot of that kind of emotional intelligence in. and then we had a training academy in the business, so we knew how to do training. We did quite a bit of transformation work with clients, so we knew about behavior change and how to make that happen. So we had a lot of the ingredients in place. And then honestly, Harv, to be honest, we then just kind of made it up as we went along.

Harv:

Okay.

Trenton Moss:

We would just be look, we would talk as a leadership about what are the problems that we're seeing in the business in terms of the way people are with clients?

Harv:

Hmm. Hmm.

Trenton Moss:

and what does success look like? And then we would come up with what we call the Webcredible way and codify what good looked like. Because what good looks like for one agency would be different to what good looks like for another. There'll be a lot of similarities. So we came up with a lot of it ourselves to be fair. And then because we knew how to do, as I said, training and behavior change, we could, we could, we could easily implement it.

Harv:

And with that training, was that all kind of, you know, those client skills, was that kind of your own doing as well?

Trenton Moss:

Yeah. And the one thing that we learned very early on that this can't be, we, we started off doing this and we had to can it. We, is that, this can't be, you will need to be like us, and that doesn't work. And what we realized what does work is here's what good looks like. And let's do loads and loads of like, like workshops and training around self awareness and emotional intelligence. So you can properly understand yourself and your communication style and your personality type. And then, you need to work out how best to apply this, you know, you now know who you are and what works for you, and you know what good looks like according to what we think good looks like. You got to work out how to get there now

Harv:

I like that.

Trenton Moss:

That was quite empowering.

Harv:

You know, you mentioned these pods were about 15 people. What was the makeup of these teams in terms of profiles?

Trenton Moss:

Yeah, the pod we had, it was basically client services and delivery. So the leader of the pod was what we called an experience director, which is a, a UX person who's, who's now pretty senior is kind of like a, a mix of, delivery and client services, and then we'd have an account director, a project manager, and then various levels of different consultants. And then, and then we'd have on every client engagement, you'd have a, you know, someone doing the kind of the client leadership, someone doing the project management, and at least a couple, and usually two, two to three kind of practitioners, but then, but then the person doing the client leadership and the project management would flex depending on, you know, the scale of it. So for the smaller stuff, you wouldn't have a dedicated PM. The, the, the, the, the account director might just do that. Or for the smaller stuff, you might not even have an account director. You might just be the practitioner who does that. So we'd have those roles ready, but we had this flex model, to allow it to work for the client. Because this is the big problem that a lot of agencies have, is right, all these delivery people, But you know, God, you can't really expect them just to organize everything. They're spending half their time doing admin. Okay. I better get a project manager and to help with that or someone of that ilk. And then it's like, okay, well, everyone's just kind of busy delivering and looking out for the risks and making sure everything's okay. But no one's growing the account. No one's, think looking for the opportunities, I better get a client services leader and an account director or whatever. And before, you know, you've got this massively bloated team and the client's like, well, why am I paying for all these people? So the model we came up with actually, it generally worked well because we could then, you know, so everyone was kind of T shaped. Everyone had their specialism. Like you're a, a UX practitioner, you're a PM, you're, you're an AD, but then they might flex their muscles to do one of those other roles, if it just didn't seem to make commercial sense from the client's point of view to pay for a whole extra person to do that.

Harv:

Makes sense. one, I guess, just an observation. I'm going to say it wrong. Was it WMIF?

Trenton Moss:

WMIF! Yeah, WMIF! We made it fund!

Harv:

And we made it fund. Okay. I, I love that approach in It contributed to the company culture, it wasn't like you were saying the financial reward sometimes can be, it can end up feeling quite piddly or people can start relying on it and it just doesn't motivate them anymore. So I love that what you did actually contributed to the company culture by the things people got to do and experience. And I also, I think what's great about your approach is made with these pods is it made everyone entrepreneurial. You know, rather than just,

Trenton Moss:

entrepreneur is a bit of... exact 5 percent of their brain was entrepreneurial. But that, but, but when you apply that across everyone, that, that, that is a win because what, what would happen before is people might be working with a client. They might potentially see opportunities, but they don't have the confidence to kind of say anything to anyone. They're not even sure who they should talk to. so by bringing it in the pods, it gave everyone that kind of framework in which to, to contribute to that conversation, but they weren't the ones then going to hunt for it and then make it happen.

Harv:

hmm.

Trenton Moss:

It was like that team effort, but the experience director or account director would be, you know, generally leading from the front with that, so it worked really nicely. And then the WMIF, if you're right, it really did contribute to the culture. And we, so, so when it comes to money, money for me is, is not a motivator, right? So if you pay someone a salary lower, than what they think they deserve, that can be demotivating. But as soon as you're paying someone what they think they're worth,

Harv:

Mm hmm.

Trenton Moss:

I don't believe if you paid them any more that you will add to their motivation.

Harv:

Mm.

Trenton Moss:

What motivates me, sorry, what motivates people, I believe, is what Dan Pink writes about in his book Drive, which is autonomy, mastery, and purpose. In autonomy, obviously having ownership, mastery, the ability to get good at something and purpose, you know, understanding the reason why you're doing something. So, you know, back to the WMIF, there was just, you know, it's like, right, you got this reward. You've got total autonomy to work out what you want to do. and I think that was why it was, one of the reasons it was motivating.

Harv:

Excellent. you know, the, the one other observation, I guess, which, which I love as an operations person is that you had this very operational process with what you applied, you know, you're talking about this kind of checklist in, in terms of the approach people had to take to follow this stuff. And I think that leads us into our next, kind of example that you wanted to take us through how you operationalised things. Let's, let's talk about some of that.

Trenton Moss:

I mean, I'm a, I'm naturally quite process driven, so I like to kind of get involved in something, you know, with the team work out the best way of doing it and be like, right, let's just repeat that. And sometimes I take that a bit far because sometimes, you know, the world moves on and so what works today doesn't always work tomorrow. So I, I have to sometimes hold myself back, but essentially from the off with the agency. So I was the sole founder. you know, once I was able to get it going and realize that it was a viable business and, and, and started getting a team, from there on in my personal objective was to make myself redundant from every single aspect of the business. So it was just gradually over time, hiring people to take over from me. So, you know, someone to run delivery, someone to run client services, someone to run, you know, resource management and project management and so on.

Harv:

hmm.

Trenton Moss:

Someone to run new business and marketing and so on. and it took a while, if I'm fair, it took, it took 13 years to get there.

Harv:

Hmm.

Trenton Moss:

After 13 years, the company kind of ran itself without... I had a wonderful MD who ran it day to day. And I wasn't so involved on the day to day basis. And I could have, I could have like gone out, I cycled around London. I could have cycled home, been hit by a bus, got under the bus, end of Trenton. And if they didn't replace me or do anything to replace me, they, I don't, I'm not sure if that have survived long, long term, but certainly for six, six months to a year, that'd have been absolutely fine.

Harv:

Hmm.

Trenton Moss:

And then it'd have just worked out a way of replacing me. So, it was really nice that it was, it's a very satisfying feeling to have something that I guess ultimately, you know, you've created and to know it's now kind of running itself and it runs itself in your image, right? Because if you're a founder, you create something in your image based on your personality type and your values. So to see that running is, you know, without you, it's incredibly rewarding.

Harv:

Amazing. so let's move into the next area. You know, one, one of my questions before was whether you brought in external support or kind of advisors and that kind of thing, and, and you, you were mentioning something about an advisory board, so tell us about that.

Trenton Moss:

Yeah. It worked really well for us. So. You know, I'd often have like non execs and agency advisors kind of knocking on the door saying, Hey, let's go for coffee or let's chat.

Harv:

Mm-Hmm

Trenton Moss:

For me, just for me, it just, it never felt right. So when you're running an agency, it's just like, it's just go, go, go, go, go. Right.

Harv:

mm-Hmm. Mm-Hmm

Trenton Moss:

You've got everything being thrown at you. You've got no time for anything. It's like, come on, let's go, go, go. And all of the advisors I'd meet and the potential NEDs who did that for a job, like, you know, they'd come in the office and, you know, we'd have a drink and they'd all just talk so slowly. And it would be like, if I don't kick you out, you're going to be here all day.

Harv:

mm-Hmm.

Trenton Moss:

And so it just, it just never sat right with me. It just didn't feel for me anyway. Maybe I just didn't meet the right people, but it just didn't feel like the right thing. It was my father in law actually, over Christmas one year, who suggested about setting up an advisory board. And I thought, Ooh, that seems like a good idea.

Harv:

Mm-Hmm.

Trenton Moss:

I reached out to a few people and we ended up getting going. so on our board, we would generally have two agency people and one brand person. So the brand person would usually be someone very senior, our target client, from a big brand. So chief digital officer type person, which also did mean that then they couldn't be a client. So it would, you know, it would have to be a brand that we don't work with and perhaps we're okay, never working with them. so we'd get someone very senior, you know, usually like a global chief digital officer in to keep us up to date with what's, you know, tell us what's going on in, in brands. What are people talking about? And then we'd get two agency people in and we'd try and get people in who could support us with whatever kind of bigger initiative we've got that we're working on. So like when we were like, right, we're going to launch internationally. Cause that was such a great idea. Um, we, we made sure that, you know, we, we got someone who has kind of launched in multiple locations. and so basically I'd just reach out to people on LinkedIn. I'll be like, Hey, I've got this agency and we've got an advisory board. You potentially interested, you know, it's like three days a year of your time all in. So you obviously do this on the side and we'll pay you a bit for it. So I got a very very good response rate and then like really good I was surprised every time and then i'd go and you know generally go and have a coffee with everyone and chat them and talk about you know my agency and and it what was really weird was when we were recruiting new people for the board I'd have to, I'd have to turn some people down for it cause I'd meet a few. So I went to meet the global CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi and we sat there for an hour and I'm telling him all about my agency and we're chatting and we're getting on well and he's like, yeah, this sounds great. I'd love to be on your board. I was like, great. So I went back to the office and I was chatting to my MD and I was like, the global CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi is interested. Like we have to have him. Right. Like, like it's the global CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi. And the next day I went to meet, the global CEO of an Omnicom business called Hall Partners, this lady called Vanella Jackson, who to this day is, is potentially the most impressive person I've ever met. She just blew me away. I felt like I'd been dragged through a hedge backwards and forwards and backwards for an hour, and I came out of there all just disheveled and oh my God, what just happened to me? But wow, she has to be on my board. So a week later I phone up the global CEO of Saatchi Saatchi and I'm like, yeah, hi, it's Trenton here. You know, that piddly little agency I run compared to yours. and we talked about you maybe being on the board. Yeah, I'm sorry. It's a no. And so that was just like, Really weird. So, but, but, but, you know, we get really good people on the boards. I had Vanella on the board for, for a while. I had, Karen Blackett who runs WPP in the UK on the board. I had Ian Milner who runs iris, a thousand person marketing agency. You know, we've got some really brilliant people on the board and, and none of them really care about the money. So, it was paid and it's important that it's paid. So they take it seriously.

Harv:

Mm,

Trenton Moss:

But it was a lot less than what the professional advisors charge and the NEDs. No one's doing it for the money. They're doing it because they enjoy it.

Harv:

Mm.

Trenton Moss:

And as a board, we'd get together once a quarter, to talk about whatever we wanted to talk about, really. So me and my MD had to kind of drive the conversation. We had to talk about our strategic initiatives for the next year or so, and then, you know, take that back to each quarter. And then what we were doing the next quarter, and we'd usually have a kind of a question, a kind of a topic of discussion and some guiding questions. So we'd send them a pack before, like a pre-read. And we'd go through that. And it was absolutely brilliant. It's one of the, I talked before about, you know, I think I did three successful things. One was all that client leadership stuff. And another was this advisory board. It was, I met some of the most brilliant people, but what, what it does, like none of them, like what it helped me realize was like, none of this is rocket science and no one has the answers and all of the challenges we face in our piddly little 3 million pound agency compared to their, you know, mega agencies. It was the same problems, just on a bigger scale. And they also didn't have the solutions. There's no like silver bullet. You just gotta kind of keep moving forward and doing your best. So that was really reassuring. But the other thing it brought us, it just meant we had to act strategically because otherwise you just get sucked into firefighting every single day. And it's very easy to do that when you're on the leadership of an agency. I remember one time we had a board meeting and me and my MD looked at each other and we were like, We've got that board meeting coming up. What did we talk about last time? Oh my God, I can't even remember. And you just, time flies by. And then we had three weeks where we had to like get ourselves together and like act on the things we said we'd do and prepare for the next one. And so, you know, normally we were more organized than that, but, but the point is it forced us to act strategically and to pull ourselves out of the weeds. And that was just, just brilliant. And you'll get that obviously with any advisor, but I think in particular with these guys, because they were so senior and they had a full time job, that it was almost like, if you've got like a professional advisor coming in every month, you're like, Oh, no, I haven't done that stuff, then there'll be like, Oh, well, okay. Well, I'll see you next month, and hopefully you've done it. Whereas for these guys, we were like, we haven't done this stuff. And they were like, well, why are we giving up our time to be here? And it's almost like we had to do right by them to keep them motivated, to keep them wanting to do it. And that, that drove us forward so well. So the advisory board was so successful and then, they were brilliant also, like towards the end of the last year and a half, we had the most it was just absurd the last year and a half of the business. So you, you, you know, there's always ups and downs and it's a rollercoaster ride. And the last year and a half was the biggest down we'd ever had. And the biggest up we'd ever had. I, I don't know how I like survived it without like ending up in a mental institution. It was, it was crazy. And we had, well, we had, we had six months of consecutive losses, hemorrhaging hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pounds and the board, you know, just stepped up and we called like, so we had like a board meeting every quarter. They got booked in at the start of the year and you had to give eight weeks notice to change the date. So no one ever, no one changed the date and everyone came. They always happened. So these are really busy people, right? So we reached out to them all saying, look, we're in trouble. Right. Please can we get together? And I think three days later, they're all in our office having, I mean, they just dropped what they were doing to help us. It was, just so brilliant. And they were so incredibly supportive during that time. So, you know, we had Karen from WPP and Ian from Iris, and they gave up so much of their time during that six months. And they didn't have to help us. So the problem we had was that we had, we had New business fell off a cliff. We had a massive problem with new business.

Harv:

Mm.

Trenton Moss:

Which was, which was killing us. and they basically helped us put together this, this proactive new business plan that we'd never done before.

Harv:

Mm hmm.

Trenton Moss:

I, me and the team just killed ourselves putting into practice and making it work and pulling ourselves out of it. And they were absolutely brilliant. And then for the nine, after that period ended, when we stopped making a loss for the nine months after revenue, just went up and up and up and up. So that coupled with the success with our existing clients with the client leadership stuff meant the business was just flying. We were doing the most incredible work. Operationally wise, we were set. Everything was amazing. So for after our six months of losses, we had nine months of consecutive month on month growth, every single month revenue went up. And, by month nine, we were tracking our highest ever revenue, on a 40 percent net margin. So we, we clawed back all the money that we lost. And during that period, like actually the, the agency sale process began as well.

Harv:

Mm.

Trenton Moss:

So that was a really big thing. And again, the advisors just, again, they didn't have to, but they just got so involved, especially Ian from Iris. He was, he was just amazing. And they just stepped in and helped so much and went so above and beyond what they had to do.

Harv:

Yeah.

Trenton Moss:

Yeah, going back, back the advisory board, like, oh, it was just absolutely brilliant. I just, just so grateful to the, to those guys for supporting us. And I think they got a lot out of it as well.

Harv:

Yeah.

Trenton Moss:

It was a great experience.

Harv:

Amazing. How many people out of interest were on that board?

Trenton Moss:

Three, we'd have three at a time. And...

Harv:

Three at a time. Okay.

Trenton Moss:

And something, we learned the hard way, We did it a year rolling, you know, agreement, so to speak. So it was a bit of an agreement that they signed. and we put in there like after three years, this will end. You will no longer be on our board after three years. And we learned the hard way. We had two people on the board who were, who were brilliant, absolutely amazing. So they were there. And after about two and a half years, we were like, it's just getting a bit samey now, like.

Harv:

Okay.

Trenton Moss:

We had two, with these two people, we basically say to them, like, we'd like you to step down from the board, which is a bit awkward. Cause it was like, you're amazing. You've contributed so much that you've done nothing wrong. We just want to freshen it up a bit. so then we put it in the agreement that like, yeah, it's three years. So I think with any advisor, based on that experience, I think two and a half, three years is, perhaps the max time where someone's going to add value.

Harv:

That's fair. And, the question I wanted to ask was, you know, when you said this revenue fell off a cliff out of interest, was that before or after you'd set up these sales pods and that.

Trenton Moss:

It was after it was during, it was there. So...

Harv:

What happened then?

Trenton Moss:

So so the pods were focused on existing accounts and developing accounts and they did support new business. The way we did new business didn't change.

Harv:

Hmm.

Trenton Moss:

So we didn't take our eye off the ball on new business at all. The pod structure just, just kind of got people focusing more on commercial stuff. what happened was we think just the perfect storm of so many different things coming together.

Harv:

Okay.

Trenton Moss:

Probably the main one was just how competitive user experience got. It went so mainstream all of a sudden that said before we had Accenture and IBM invading the space. We had every big marketing agency invading the space. Just everyone was there.

Harv:

Hmm. Mm

Trenton Moss:

It wasn't that we were losing pitches. We just weren't pitching. and so I remember I just had my second kid and new biz just, just, just went really quiet. And I was like, okay, this isn't a bad thing because I'm kind of busy at home. So like a quiet period for a month or two will be quite nice. And that quiet period just went on and on and on, and there was just no inquiries.

Harv:

hmm.

Trenton Moss:

And for 13 years, 13 or 14 years, we had relied on this steady stream of inbound inquiries coming in from marketing from word of mouth and so on and so on, and we didn't need to do too much proactive new biz, you know, the outreach or anything like that. And yeah, that tap turned off. It just stopped.

Harv:

Interesting. Okay.

Trenton Moss:

So if you're listening and you are an agency that pretty much just relies on inbound inquiries, you know, you're doing your marketing, you're doing your word of mouth you're doing a few things, yeah, get an outbound strategy in place because that tap can turn off at any moment and you will have no forewarning.

Harv:

And we talk to people all the time and you know, I know that like, past year and a half has been difficult and that's been the reality.

Trenton Moss:

Can I say it has been very hard, but what, what the, what we ended up doing, which is what I think you could be doing at the moment and should be doing over the last year and a half. So with the help of our advisory board, we put on new business strategy in place and implemented it. And we made a play to own that kind of strategic UX place and to make ourselves the experts out there. and to, to just make it so clear that that's our niche and when times get hard, we move away from our niche because we're like, Oh, we want to do a bit of this and a bit, we'll just do anything. Cause you know, cause you're in panic stations and it's just, it's about doubling down on your niche and then it's doing things like you know, podcasting, like what you're doing, creating communities for people in that niche, launching a journal about that niche, doing events within that niche and so on and so on and so on, which is, and that's what we did. We launched them community for UX leaders within brands. And this was my third really successful thing. The third of three, I've got, I've spoken about all of them. This community was mad successful for the business and it's what turned it around. Okay. So we launched this community for the UX leaders within brands. It was a closed community with, with, with hand select people, so to speak, but essentially if you were a potential client, you know, you were in, and, they'd get to go, we get together every month for round table, have about 20 people coming along each time. And we'd curate, you know, we'd curate the discussion, but they'd bring the content. They were just because they don't care about us as an agency. They care about themselves or just really lonely in their jobs. So we got all these leaders together in a structured way, to basically just share their pain and come up with solutions together.

Harv:

Mm.

Trenton Moss:

By running that consistently month after month after month, we were basically in touch with all of these leaders. And before you know it, we've won Tesco. We've won Vodafone. We've won Visa. We've won RBS. And you know what? We didn't have to pitch for any of them.

Harv:

Amazing. So Trenton, you, you know, you talk a lot about emotional intelligence and how that impacts leadership. Agency people talk about a lot of different things, but emotional intelligence isn't one of those, but it's so important to relationships and you've highlighted that in some of your examples. And in fact, you've written a book about this called Human Powered. so can you tell us a bit about that? What does it get into?

Trenton Moss:

Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, emotional intelligence, essentially, three parts to it, right?

Harv:

Mm hmm.

Trenton Moss:

Self awareness, there's knowing yourself and understanding the things that you do to positively impact people and the things that you do perhaps to negatively impact you and all of us we will, you know, have things that we do for both so it's that real like self awareness and understanding and what drives you and what motivates you and you know, what upsets, frustrates and annoys you.

Harv:

Mm hmm.

Trenton Moss:

So emotional intelligence is very, very much about understanding yourself.

Harv:

Mm hmm.

Trenton Moss:

Equally it's about understanding others and having empathy for others. And empathy and sympathy are not the two, they're not the same thing. Empathy is about understanding where the other person is coming from. And it's about assuming the best of intentions with everyone because no one sets out to wrong you or frustrate you or annoy you. I didn't wake up this morning thinking, Oh, what can I do to really annoy Harv on that podcast? What are the things I could do or say that's really gonna get under his skin?

Harv:

Mm.

Trenton Moss:

That's just not a thing, but people will do and say things that frustrate and upset you. So emotional intelligence is about looking beyond people's behavior and understanding actually, you know, where are they coming from?

Harv:

Mm.

Trenton Moss:

And the final part of it is bringing those together. And it's about everything you do, taking a win win, mentality. So like, right, here's where I'm coming from. Here's what success looks like for me, and here's where you're coming from. And here's what success looks like for you. How do we get a win win? I will not be happy if we leave this conversation with you not getting a good outcome. And equally I will be as unhappy if I don't get a good outcome. Let's work together to make that a reality for both of us. So the book, I mean, the book is, you know, loosely based on the skills program that I ran in my agency, Webcredible. That's where it all kind of started coming about. and it's about how you deal with difficult conversations. Cause we have difficult conversations with clients all the time. It's about how you put up deep and meaningful relationships with them. how you lead and inspire clients and get them to sign off your work quickly. And then how are you kind of successful with them in all your interactions? And because here's the thing, when you work agency side, doing amazing work is only half the battle. And for many agencies and in particular practitioners, we think that great work will just be enough. And it's not, and I've seen in my, you know, in my agency, I was doing some of the most amazing work and it's just not landing so well because we haven't sold it in properly. So doing amazing work is half the battle. And the other half is having everyone else and having your clients think you're doing amazing work. It's about using your emotional intelligence to make sure they believe that what you've done is as amazing as what it is.

Harv:

You, you also have a podcast of the same name, human powered. So you talk about the similar themes. What kinds of people do you talk, talk to?

Trenton Moss:

Yeah. I mean, generally it's agency leaders that come on the podcast and we talk about high performing teams.

Harv:

Mm.

Trenton Moss:

It's like, what do you, you know, you've got a, a successful business. No one thinks of their own business as successful,

Harv:

Yeah.

Trenton Moss:

Because all you do is see the problems. but you know, you do have a successful business. What are the things that you do to, to make that business high performing? And, and it's almost always based on people. You know, what are the things you do therefore to make, high performing teams?

Harv:

Mm

Trenton Moss:

I've, you know, like with you, I'm sure I've, I've learned, I've learned so much by doing the podcast. It's absolutely fascinating hearing the kind of different things that, that people are doing.

Harv:

Absolutely. Amazing. Trenton, this was just such a fantastic conversation and there's so much I'm sure people would be able to learn from speaking to you. Where can they find out more information about yourself?

Trenton Moss:

Oh well, LinkedIn, I mean, one of the, when I was a kid, I didn't like having an unusual name because you usually want to fit in as a kid.

Harv:

Yeah.

Trenton Moss:

but as a grownup being called Trenton Moss is quite useful. So there are actually two Trenton Mosses on LinkedIn.

Harv:

Okay.

Trenton Moss:

One is a network engineer in Salt Lake City.

Harv:

Right.

Trenton Moss:

I'm the other one.

Harv:

Okay. And your website as well?

Trenton Moss:

Yeah, it's, sterka.team.

Harv:

Excellent. Okay. this has been absolute pleasure and so inspiring hearing your stories. So thank you so much for being with us today.

Trenton Moss:

It's been really enjoyable. Thanks, Harv.

Harv:

Thanks Trenton. I felt incredibly inspired listening to Trenton on the changes he brought to his past agency, from the pod and reward structure he brought in, to the in house training and operational approach he implemented, to the advisory board he had set up. Do reach out to him if you need some perspective at your own place of work. And before I go, please share this podcast with your agency friends and tell them to subscribe. Number two, please share your feedback on this episode in a comment when I post this on LinkedIn, Trenton and I would love to hear what you think, and it helps other people in your network discover the podcast as well. And number three, please sign up for the handbook newsletter so you get the key takeaways in your inbox from each episode. You can go to scoro.com/podcast and scroll down to find the newsletter signup form. Thank you so much for listening and I'll be back soon with another episode.

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Harv Nagra

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