The Handbook: The Operations Podcast

Running your agency like clockwork with Jinny Mitchell-Kent

• Harv Nagra • Season 1 • Episode 19

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How do you create a highly efficient agency without losing flexibility or quality?

In this episode, Harv Nagra sits down with Jinny Mitchell-Kent, Joint Managing Director at Great State. With nearly 20 years of experience at agencies big and small—including global powerhouse AKQA—Jinny shares how she’s applying lessons from her big-agency days to a 100-person team.

Here’s what you’ll hear:

  • How moving from COO to MD changed her focus from internal projects to building client relationships, while maintaining her focus on performance and excellence.
  • The strategies Great State uses to compete with much larger agencies by staying lean and adaptable – from scaling up the team quickly when required, to creating a flexible delivery framework.
  • Practical tips on managing costs, tracking profitability, and keeping teams running smoothly.
  • How Jinny is championing inclusivity with initiatives like the Great Women’s Network.

If you want to learn how to streamline your operations and scale smarter, this episode is packed with insights you can put to work right away. Give it a listen!

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Harv Nagra:

Thanks for listening to The Handbook: The Agency Operations podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Scoro. If you're a regular listener, you know that I love talking about business maturity levels. Level one is where you're just making things up as you go. Level two is where you have pockets of best practice in your agency. The real milestone is level three. This is where you really grow up and centralize and codify your best practice and have best in class tools in place, and this is usually where agencies realize they need a consolidated tool to run their business. A platform like Scoro. From there, you can move on to level four, where you become a data driven organization. I saw the benefits moving to Scoro brought my agency. So where are you at? Is it time for you to move on to the next maturity level? Sign up for a free trial at Scoro. com. Or, if you arrange a demo call, tell them Harv sent you. Now, back to the episode.​Hi all, welcome back to the podcast. We all work for agencies of different sizes, each of which has unique challenges based on size and maturity. While I've worked for global businesses in the past, I haven't worked for a agency with thousands of employees and dozens of offices around the world. What would we learn from someone with that that kind of experience that we could apply at our own organizations. Well, I've got someone on the podcast today with exactly that kind of experience. And she'll be telling us how she's taken what she's learned and applied it at her current agency, which is about a hundred people. Our guest today is Jinny Mitchell Kent. Jinny joined Great State, a digital product and service design agency as COO four years ago, and today is in the role of Joint Managing Director. Prior to Great State, Jinny was working at a global design and innovation agency, a name many of you might recognize, AKQA. Jinny has over 19 years of experience in digital agencies, working with global brands such as Dyson, Fiat, Rolls Royce, Bupa, and more. She also has a long history of working with government and defense clients. With that vast experience, I'm so excited to see what we can learn from Jinny. So let's get into it. Jinny, welcome to the podcast. Let's start with your agency background. In your case, you've gone from Ops a MD role, which is really interesting and I think could be really inspiring for some of our audience.

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

Yeah, sure. so my experience is all in digital agencies. I started sort of straight out of university, in project management. So I joined what was then E3 Media in Bristol, as a production coordinator when the agency was around 30 people. and I guess my progression has been through account management and project management. Account management was the role that my production coordinator turned into, which was sort of hybrid projects and account management. And I was at, E3 Media for about three and a half years before I moved to London and went to, AKQA as a project manager, which, you know, the size and scale was very, very different. And it's, it was an incredible place to work. I learned a huge amount, but I really had, very good grounding in E3 Media and all the kind of things that I learned there. At AKQA, I worked my way up through the sort of project management and program management roles. So from project manager to senior, then associate program director, program director. Then I looked after a group, increasingly sort of large and complex programs of work and bigger teams. And by the time I left AKQA, I was head of delivery and operations for London. So I think operations was really quite a natural progression from delivery. There are quite a lot of overlaps in terms of things like monitoring, reporting, resourcing, identifying and developing processes and generally just organizing stuff. and I think the more senior I became, the more operational management I was getting involved in naturally. And I was really interested in process development and how to improve ways of working and look at things like profitability. And that was really what led me back then to what is now Great State. I had been commuting to London for a while. After my second maternity leave, I decided to freelance a bit and see what my options were closer to home in Bristol. So I joined Great State as an operations consultant to help with some efficiency and profitability challenges that they had at the time. So that was a sort of eight month or eight to nine month stint as a, on a freelance basis. And then I became the permanent COO. So that role was incredibly broad. I think operations generally can be very, very broad. and it meant that I was getting involved in a lot of the leadership and management of the business more generally. and so then that became quite a natural shift. Into the joint managing director role. and it's been really great to do that with my MD partner, David. but yeah, it hasn't felt sort of this seismic shift, I suppose. it's been kind of quite organic.

Harv Nagra:

I love that whole story but I do wonder have your priorities and focus shifted from the COO to the MD or co MD role.

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

Yeah, it definitely has, potentially I was slightly naive in, in my thinking that this was just going to be, you know, fairly simple change. It's definitely been a learning curve. And I think, I think I am quite the natural introvert, and a lot of my time in my previous role especially was spent looking at internal processes and working with the internal team with more sporadic client and new business involvement and things like that. So the shift to MD has been much more externally focused.

Harv Nagra:

Right.

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

and I'm having to spend more time looking outwards and, you know, networking and events and spending time with clients and things. And while I can do that well, I do find I need some like recharge, recharge time. and I think it's also, I found it a little difficult to move away from some of the operational things I was doing previously just because that's, you know, where I'm very comfortable. but our priorities really are more around the direction the business is going, focusing on making sure we have a really solid business plan with clear direction for the internal team, and then, a clearer externally facing business proposition. So those things are what we're focusing on at the moment and things that are in development.

Harv Nagra:

it's quite interesting. You know, a couple of the places that you've worked there was AKQA, which is on a vastly different scale from Great State, can you remind us what the size difference is between those two businesses?

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

Yeah, sure. so when I joined AKQA London, it was around 350 people. and over time, it actually scaled up to around about 500, but it's also a global organization. So we, had access to people across multiple countries as well. So there's actually thousands of people that work for AKQA as a whole. whereas Great State is a, UK based, independent agency of around, about 70 perm staff and then between 20 and 30 freelancers at any one time. So kind of around the hundred mark, most of the time.

Harv Nagra:

I think there's some great learnings to be had there in terms of, what you learned at AKQA and how you've applied that and what we can learn from you, therefore, and take it to our own agencies. So let's let's dig into the story a little bit more.

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

Okay.

Harv Nagra:

you tell us kind of the changes that you saw over your time there, as the agency grew.

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

Yeah, sure. I mean, I was there quite a long time, so I, think I saw a fair amount of change in, in leadership, in ways of working and in the clients that we had, in the types of work that we were doing. I was there between, 2008 and 2018, or just the start of 2019. So, So much changed in the world in that time in terms of technology and stuff, there was a lot of things happening, which I guess probably influenced some of the changes that happen within the agency. But, one change, was as we were growing at one point, we split the business into some client groups that operated in slightly different ways. So sort of to operate a bit more as independent pods.

Harv Nagra:

Okay.

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

if that Google method of like an agency within an agency sort of idea, I think the idea was ultimately to give some autonomy, more autonomy to the, to the separate groups and to help with scaling even further. and some of that was, was really positive, but I think ultimately increased Operational overheads too much, uh, because obviously lots of people doing things in different ways and we needed a little bit more consistency. so that did revert back after a while. another one is probably about, commercial changes, over the years as the market sort of changed, there was a shift, I suppose, from having some nice big retainers, and clear spend of, work that we were going to be doing on a longer term to, to shift to a bit more of a competitive and challenging environment where budgets were a bit more project by project. And that's definitely continued in, in the market over recent years. And I think that that's not necessarily more challenging for a bigger business. big and small, it's challenging. I think it comes down to, you know, how well you can build your client relationships and work closely with them and get as much visibility of the work that they're wanting to do and help them to do that. So that it's a bit more stable for you as the agency as well.

Harv Nagra:

Absolutely. Another interesting thing about AKQA is at some point they were acquired by the WPP group. many of our listeners might not have gone through an acquisition like that, myself included. So I just wanted to hear from you about your experience in terms of how that impacted processes, tools, and people. Did those change after the acquisition in any way?

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

Not really, to be honest. And I think especially at the level I was at at the time, because it was around 2012 2014, I was probably slightly more removed from business level reporting at that point. I think what I noticed was, largely, they seemed to let us get on with things as we, as we had been. there was you know, Some more focus on financial reporting, as you'd probably expect.

Harv Nagra:

Mm.

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

and I, but I think the exec management team at that point would have been the ones that kind of had more of that impact in terms of what reporting they needed to do. It certainly didn't feel like it filtered down to, to our level.

Harv Nagra:

And, and so in terms of the tools and systems that you needed to use, did those stay relatively consistent as well?

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

I mean, there was some sort of, agency wide training and process sort of compliance that was was introduced at one point, which just brought a level of robustness I think. There was sort of more, compliance things that we we needed to adhere to, which were, which was fine. It didn't really cause any overhead, and we had access then to some other things, like additional training materials and training courses that were kind of WPP group wide. so we got some benefits there, but in terms of the actual tooling, we did change our agency management tool, but I can't honestly remember whether that was as a result of the acquisition or just a global implementation that we were doing, we needed to do anyway across our, our markets. And it was quite necessary because our systems were a bit, some of them, not, not that fit for purpose. I think a bit clunky and not joined up. So, a new system was implemented.

Harv Nagra:

Super interesting. So some ways it sounds not as disruptive as somebody might think. And I, I wonder if that does come down to the size of the organization because it was a big machine.

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

I mean, certainly my perspective, I think that it didn't feel like it had a massive impact on the day to day. But, I think, one of the reasons that WPP acquired AKQA at the time was down to the reputation of the business, the quality of the work that we were doing. And so it did seem like for the most part, They were letting us get on with what we were good at and not trying to, you know, change how things were, were working. That's certainly how I felt. And I know that's not the case in some acquisitions. So we were maybe, you know, somewhat lucky in that, but, it definitely didn't seem to have a negative, or particularly disruptive impact on the, the day to day team.

Harv Nagra:

That's, that's really good to hear actually. Something you mentioned there was kind of systems and of course you had one there. It sounds like in place, but maybe it was a bit creaking. And then a new tool was brought in. Can you, can you just expand on that a little bit? You mentioned that it was an all in one system. Is that the case?

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

Yeah, pretty much. Yes. It was the system that we used to sort of set up our projects in the first place and then manage our resourcing in as well. That definitely had its benefits for sure, because there was sort of less manual effort involved in monitoring things like burn against a project and, financially, are we where we need to be, predicting whether we're going to overrun or not, profitability, managing utilization of the team and there were a lot of good reports set up that, you know, you could really quickly see the data that you needed to see.

Harv Nagra:

so in an organization like that, how robust is the reporting and forecasting?

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

Some was, was better than others, we had pretty solid processes around revenue forecasting, how to forecast revenue when it, you know, at what point in the month it should stop changing, um,

Harv Nagra:

Mm

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

sort of thing. And we tried to, there was really clear structure around reforecasting after each quarter for the rest of the year, you'd have your kind of year budget or year forecast, and then you'd reforecast every quarter, ideally it's going up, sometimes it's not, and sort of setting your targets throughout that process. What became, as I said, you know, talking about commercial challenges or changes in the market, when we had a lot of kind of long term retainers and things that sort of forecasting process was pretty straightforward. Once you get into the realms of, not knowing where the That revenue is coming from and having to kind of fight a lot harder for it, that just becomes a harder process, but having that rigor around it. So there's the very clear on how we're doing it and when we're doing it meant that, you know, it was just difficult to know quite how solid the numbers were, but you were going through the right processes. We had resource management team as well. So, they had a lot of responsibility for resource forecasting in line with the revenue forecast. So looking, you know, three, six months ahead at a type of resources we're going to need, are we the right shape? Do we need to bring in more skill sets? Like what, what are the things that are coming up that we might need to plan for? That also becomes more difficult, obviously, when you've got less visibility, but we were still trying to get a decent enough view of a roadmap. I think the one that was slightly more difficult and the one that you sort of look at after the fact is around profitability. So you need to kind of, you can do it to a certain extent as you go, because you can predict where you're going to end up

Harv Nagra:

Mm hmm.

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

monitoring your burn, which absolutely you should do, proactively managing that. But sort of at the end of a piece of work or a period of time, you get the actual information of what's happened. And sometimes it's difficult to do stuff with that information and make a change for the next quarter or six months, whatever. I don't necessarily think it's a big agency thing. It's just busy agency thing. You know, you're just moving on to the next thing. So, um, you're not necessarily paying as much attention to that as you could.

Harv Nagra:

That's always a challenge. It's a bit of a lag from taking those learnings or actually even taking the time to process those learnings and apply them to what you're doing right when,

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

Yeah.

Harv Nagra:

there's so many moving parts. That's really interesting, you went from this global agency, huge size to Great State, which I'd still say that's fairly large, about a hundred people you said with the freelancers but you've come into this from a really kind of broad experience where you've seen how that big machine works. So

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

Yeah.

Harv Nagra:

talk about the things that you took from your prior experience that you've applied to Great State?

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

I'd say one of the biggest things is my focus on quality, I think. So that was ingrained in everything we did at AKQA. It's like one of the fundamental values. and everybody kind of lives by that and operates in that way,

Harv Nagra:

Hmm.

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

thinking about how to deliver the absolute best quality. and it's really great because my MD partner is very similar, also having come from a big kind of global agency that had that kind of ethos and way of working. So we both have, pretty high expectations. We want to deliver high quality work. We're ambitious, but I think it's nice for us now in a, in a slightly smaller agency that we can operate like that and compete with, with bigger agencies, but, we're just a bit, maybe a bit more lean and a bit more nimble.

Harv Nagra:

In your day to day, how does that manifest or how is that demonstrated?

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

we're really irritating, just always telling people how it could be better. No, I think a lot of it comes down to just being clear about expectations and standards as much as you can to try and set direction for what great looks like, what are we aiming for? so in everything we do with the team is trying to, to make it clear what we think is going to separate us and, make this the best possible thing we can deliver for the client. so in some very specific examples, we've been very heavily involved in new business and over the last sort of six months or so. And so we've been able to really set the standard for what we think our new business responses need to be, for, for the future. and so being really clear about that. it's stuff like that. I think as much as possible setting clear standards and expectations of where we're trying to get to.

Harv Nagra:

So is that yourself and your partner just sharing your feedback or, or do you have any kind of processes built in across the organization that also serve as these checks?

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

so there are Some of it is the former, so we are involved in things and we'll get, you know, give our opinions and feedback and get sort of a little bit involved in working sessions or we actually create some of the outputs for new business so that we can sort of set those standards. And yeah, there are other kind of processes in place where we have the quality reviews, maybe not us solely, but our sort of heads of department for different, for our different disciplines, so that we can feel confident that, you know, the creative outputs we're delivering have been quality reviewed and

Harv Nagra:

Mm.

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

they're going to be, you know, meeting our standards. So, yeah, there's definitely that. There's more that we want to do really, because I think, although we've been in the, in the post for a year. It's not very long when you actually get, get going. and a lot of the sort of first part of that was pulling together a business plan and being clear about objectives and, and targets and things. And now the last sort of, Four to six months, we've been, as I said, quite focused on new business and setting some standards and things there. There's more that we want to do now, I think, in terms of internal processes and ways of working that we'll have a bit more, direction for the team.

Harv Nagra:

So coming back to the question we were talking about what you've taken from your kind of prior experience and applied it to Great State. So the first thing you've brought up is quality. So what else is there?

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

Yeah, so, I think some some more rigor around processes and cost management specifically. So, some of those processes that, that we used in AKQA just introduced some of those into, into Great State and none of them are really, sort of have to be specific to big agency.

Harv Nagra:

Mm

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

they're kind of just sensible things that it would be good for people to monitor and be on top of, you know, it is sometimes important to check all your subscriptions are necessary and go through all the costs in the business. and save, you know, even if it's a few hundred pounds a month overall, you just need to be operating really efficiently. So it's just things like that. yeah, having a bit of a closer view on, is each project profitable? Is each client account profitable? as a business, your profitability is managed slightly differently, but if you are operating efficiently with all of your project delivery, then that will have an impact on overall business profitability as well. Yeah. So that there was a, there was and is a agency management system in place, that is not a spreadsheet.

Harv Nagra:

Mm-Hmm.

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

so we, you know, we have systems in place already for, The, the sort of project setup, invoicing, forecasting and a separate one for resource management. So that's the only thing that we, in an ideal world, we would make a change on is to bring those things together. Because we have to do some manual effort to then tie the data together from those two systems. So it is something that we're looking at to, to replace or change anyway, the way that we, that we, the tools that we use so that we can have it slightly more joined up.

Harv Nagra:

Right. And, you've been talking about kind of, the rigor around process and cost management and given us a few examples. Are there any kind of metrics, if you put on your COO hat, what kinds of things do you look at and what you kind of expect your team to be on top of?

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

Yeah. So I guess from a, from a delivery and client services perspective, delivery are slightly more responsible for profitability, client services, a bit more for revenue and hitting revenue targets, but they are very closely aligned. You don't want loads of unprofitable revenue. and, So those those two teams working very closely together and sort of monitoring and managing those two things together is very important so they need to be on top of burn reporting and, risk management and those sorts of things. I think It's really important for both of those teams also to care about the impact of what we're delivering. So that comes down to KPIs and success metrics around the actual work. and so making sure that we have those things set at the start of a project so that we can come back and look at whether this project actually was successful and we delivered good outcomes for our clients. from an operational perspective, we will review and monitor utilization. So that is one that you can only really look at after the fact, but then trying to use that information to improve things in the future. So looking at, how much time we're spending on internal work or unbuild work and why and is it valuable use of time? What what more could we be doing? is it progressing us in some way or is it just Spending too long on admin or whatever. So, we have people who will kind of delve into that a little bit more and try and improve, improve that. We look at I guess from a financial perspective, we will gross profit, our staff to GP ratio and, you know, that ultimately leads down to, to overall profit. So, we will review that on a monthly basis and, make sure that where we have flex, or options to be flexible in our costs and when we need to, then we can make those changes. We obviously have somewhat fixed overheads, but then some things are variable like our marketing spend or, or our freelance spend, for example. So looking at where we might need to flex costs, on a monthly basis. but then I'll be looking at, you know, the quarter, ahead, rolling quarter,

Harv Nagra:

hmm.

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

you know, the next half of the year. We're just doing H2 forecasting, planning. We're just finishing it now, so that we can have a good view of where we're going to end up at the end of the financial year.

Harv Nagra:

Excellent. That's, that's really useful for us to know and then kind of benchmark ourselves against. So, so those are two examples. wondering if there's another one or

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

no, yeah, I have another one. I implemented, something called the Great Women's Network. it's similar to something I did at AKQA. so this was initially, this was around the time of International Women's Day a few Maybe four or three years ago, and we didn't want to do a kind of, here's a social post of our women who are great, obviously, but

Harv Nagra:

hmm.

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

we wanted to do something that felt a little bit more fundamental to us as a business and something that would live on. So we set up this, this network, which basically is, a forum for the women in the agency to come together, to talk about experiences, to try and sort of grow and develop. So we bring in, external speakers or go to, you know, events or do some specific training or, sort of webinars, seminars around, women in tech or what have you? and I had done a similar thing at AKQA and started this kind of program of, of activities. but it was kind of towards the end of my, of my time there before I went on maternity leave again. But, I think, Diversity and inclusion and specifically gender equality in, in the industry has always always been really important to me throughout my career. I think I didn't really notice so much when I was younger and in my first agency in Bristol. And then, it sort of became something I became aware of over, over my career and just being in rooms with men all the time. It was great, I think, once I was in a position to maybe influence things a bit more and create those kinds of environments and forums for, for the women in the, in the companies. That's been something I'm really kind of keen to do and proud to do. and David, the, the other MD as well, is, is really passionate about diversity and inclusion and, you know, creating a really positive and inclusive environment. So we have been able to implement some new policies in the business, we've implemented a menstruation and menopause policy and, you know, we have quite a lot of options around flexible working and things like that. So, Yeah, it's really great to be able to work with somebody who also shares that, that passion so that we can create, a really balanced environment. It's, yeah, been really good.

Harv Nagra:

That's excellent. And, and, you know, a, huge boost to your company culture, I'm sure, but also great for employer branding and, and very inspiring. So those are some really great examples. so we're, we're going to continue talking about Great State and from that kind of operational perspective want to hear from you about what things that you do really well, again, that hopefully we can be inspired by and apply it our own places of work. So tell us about Great State and one of those things that's really great.

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

Okay. I think one of the things we're really good at, and that people are often surprised by, I think, is the variety or the range of work that we do. For the types and scale of clients that we have given our size. we have some really notable clients, and do everything really from strategy to very creative solutions to user research to large scale military level security type platform builds. and so our processes and structure have to be flexible enough, I guess, to respond to all of that at any one time, as well as being robust enough to meet the needs of the clients and brands of that sort of scale which often you only really see possible in, in bigger agencies. So, we have been in positions where we can compete with those bigger agencies, which is often surprising, I think, to, to people. and I think we've found really good approaches to scaling, as well. And we have to do that sometimes with SC cleared resources because of our client base. and we've built some really good relationships with, recruitment partners and other agencies to do that really well, because sometimes you have to do that really quickly,

Harv Nagra:

hmm.

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

need, you need to already have those relationships in place to, be able to do that. we also have nearshore partners in place for our non MOD Clients, and that's been really instrumental in our approach to scaling at short notice as well. so some of that is just making sure you have the right processes in place to do that. Some of it is the relationships we're building with those partners. but I think, we have been very good at that.

Harv Nagra:

Excellent. I want to go back to, we'll come back to nearshoring, which I think is really interesting as well. But I want to go back to that kind of comment you made first, which was around process and structure that's allowed you to kind of win these really impressive clients and compete with much larger organizations or agencies. So what, what have you done around your processes or a structure to allow you to do that? If you can give us some examples of what you have in place at Great State that enables this kind of work.

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

Yeah, sure. So we are structured in client groups. So So we align clients to client partners and Delivery Leads. So they are responsible for looking after that group of accounts. and within that, then we will align, discipline leads to specific client work so that they build up a certain amount of knowledge and understanding of the, of the client, the technology that they use, you know, their requirements and potential strategic objectives or whatever, so that, you can maintain some level of consistency, but then you are sharing resources across those client groups, so it's not completely managed sort of separately. I think our processes are, I mean, we have a kind of delivery framework that we work to, which is founded in Agile principles. Because we work with a lot of government clients, it also aligns very well to the government digital standards way of working. Plus it's also very flexible, very adaptable. As anyone who works in an agency knows, it's unlikely that every client is going to work in the same way. So you have to build your, your frameworks and your processes in a way that are, able to be flexed and adapted. So, you know, making sure our teams know what are the non negotiable things that we have to do, like what are the business critical reporting, things that we need. but then what can flex because a client needs to work in a slightly different way. So some of our government or MOD clients need different reporting, and we have to provide things in a different cadence or, they need more information than some of our, you know, corporate clients might need. So there are things that we have to put in place for the specific client groups that don't exist in every area of the business, but it's just having the fundamentals there so you have enough kind of rigor and process and structure to be able to deliver well, but the, the knowledge of which things can be more flexible so that it adapts to, to the needs of that specific client.

Harv Nagra:

Great answer. before we move on, I wanted to just touch on something. You know, you've got these kind of client groups here. there was this, earlier example you gave of these pods at AKQA that kind of failed. And, and they resulted in maybe, you know, too much overhead or, or redundancy in terms of, roles or, or, or things like that. So what's the difference? Why does it work at Great State, but it didn't work there?

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

so, um, actually, when I first came back to to Great State, they had also implemented a similar thing. and, again, I think it it didn't work for a different reason, or similar, but slightly different reason at Great States. Partly the problem when it was implemented here was that, we're a bit too small to allocate specific resources only to one Client group. so you know, there'd be this amazing technical architect that everyone wants, but they can't do it. they can't go and work on this other client because they're over here in this, in this team. so that became very challenging alongside the operational overheads, which obviously when I came back in, I was like, that is probably going to be difficult for you guys because you're all doing things in different ways

Harv Nagra:

Hmm.

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

we're too small to do that, I think. that's when we shifted it to client groups. So the difference in that is that there is much more flex and movement in the rest of the resources. So instead of each one operating almost like an agency within an agency and having to keep all of those people busy all of the time, generally client services and delivery stay fixed in those teams and then you might have, say that we have a group with four accounts in it, the technical lead might only work on two of those accounts and then another one in a different group,

Harv Nagra:

I

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

um, based on their expertise, their technical experience, whatever it might be. So it just allows, one, it allows some variety, but it also just allows that flexibility that, you know, one team is not having to sort of keep a set number of people busy all the time. It allows you to just adapt and scale up and down as you need to.

Harv Nagra:

That makes sense. It sounds like resourcing is just much more stable as a result of that just because you can share that resource and it doesn't become kind of locked in as

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

There's certainly less of an overhead associated with, you know, or just not, it also just minimizes wasted time, because if you're like, I need to keep this person busy, but I've got no billable work for them, what can I get them to do? it makes people become a little bit kind of territorial and protective about stuff when actually this project over here could really benefit from their free time right now. so it's just makes it, make everyone have a better use of time and, it not be quite so sort of siloed.

Harv Nagra:

Makes sense. that leads nicely into that other example you gave about nearshoring, which is something that you do really well at Great State. So tell us about that. How does that work?

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

Yeah, so, we've worked with a couple over the time that I've been here and it's been for various different things and, generally it just provides us some really good scaling options quickly, I would say the majority of the, the time we use it for development resource, just to scale up bigger teams, more quickly. And the company that we generally work with are, very responsive. They're very flexible, move people around their side and provide us lots of different options. And they have similar skill sets to ours in terms of the technologies we use. but also offer some other things that we don't, have in house or don't do so much of in house because you can't, as much as we aim to be, you know, technology agnostic, there are some platforms that you just can't build up that much knowledge in house across all of them, at our sort of size. So it allows us to sort of bring in additional skill sets when we need to. This is a little bit like a nearshore recruiter, except they do actually work for the company that we partner with. it gives us basically access to, thousands of developers, in lots of different skill sets, and some other resources now that they are starting to introduce. So, some sort of more UX production, some, project management, although We have a very, large project management team. So we don't need to do that currently, but, yeah, they're starting to sort of bring in other, other roles, but we've predominantly used it for development.

Harv Nagra:

Okay. Really, really useful. Thank you for that. We're we're coming to the kind of the end of our conversation. so Jinny, where can people go and learn more about you and Great State?

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

cool. Okay. So we were in the process of redeveloping our website right now. So that's Going live at the end of November. So that would be a good place to to sort of find out about us as a business. we're quite active on LinkedIn, and Instagram. So that's quite a good starting point. We often run sort of webinars and events and things that we share on, on LinkedIn. We have some blogs that talk about me specifically

Harv Nagra:

Okay.

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

Or things if anybody actually cares about that, but yeah, that that's probably a good start.

Harv Nagra:

Excellent. We'll put a link to that in our episode notes. And I just want to thank you before we go once again for joining us today. I think you've given us some really nice examples of what works well. And I think your credit to yourself and Great State about setting a benchmark in terms of what we should be aspiring for. So I really appreciate

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

Oh, well, thank you very much. That's high praise. it was lovely to talk to you.

Harv Nagra:

Thank you so much.

Jinny Mitchell-Kent:

All right. Thanks.

Harv Nagra:

I found that really interesting. Firstly, hearing about the workings of such a large agency. I was also a bit surprised that the acquisition by WPP didn't have more of a dramatic impact at AKQA. But like we said in the conversation, that may have been due to the size of the business being a force in itself. Given her experience, the former COO title, and that she's currently joint MD, What I'm not surprised by is how impressive an organization Jinny seems to be running now. It definitely sounds like the processes, systems, and controls they have in place are at least what I would call level four in terms of business maturity, meaning they're data driven. But if I was really able to take a closer look at their offer and client experience, it's quite possible they're at a level five, which is where they're really able to lean into innovation. It's difficult and rare to get to either of those stages. So hats off to Jinny and the team at Great State. Now, if you have any feedback on the show or have any topic you'd like us to cover, send me a DM on LinkedIn. And if you're enjoying the conversations we have on the podcast and think they're valuable, please share the podcast with your agency friends or help me get the word out even further and post about the show or an episode you loved on LinkedIn saying what you loved about it. I'll be back here with the next episode soon. Thank you so much for listening.

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Harv Nagra

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