The Handbook: The Operations Podcast

How to move from tactical to STRATEGIC ops with WPP's Preston Chandler

• Harv Nagra • Season 1 • Episode 23

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Your agency’s operations can either fuel creativity, or kill it.

And you can focus on the big picture that drives real financial impact, or get stuck in the weeds.

Preston Chandler, WPP’s Global Practice Lead of Strategic Operations has a point of view, and the experience to prove it. In fact, Preston’s role at WPP is all about advising agencies in the group on how they can operate in a better, smarter, and more strategic way.

In this conversation, Preston shares how agencies can design their operations to be smarter, leaner, and more effective, without slowing down creativity.

Whether you're fine-tuning your structure or scaling innovation, this conversation will challenge you to think about how your agency is run—and how to take it to the next level.

Here’s what we dive into:

  • Why your agency model (not just your talent) defines your success
  • How governance can empower teams instead of creating roadblocks
  • The ideal team structure to boost efficiency and collaboration
  • Smarter ways of working—moving beyond outdated processes
  • Why continuous improvement (not just annual reviews) is the key to long-term growth

Plus, Preston shares insights on AI’s impact on agencies, the pitfalls of hierarchy, and how to make change stick.


Follow Preston on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prestonchandler/

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.

Harv Nagra:

Hey all, welcome back to the podcast. Operations means different things to different people. For those of us in the field, no two job descriptions or days look the same. I'm certain that's the case for all the ops leaders listening to this. Early on, when things are in those chaotic stages, operations often has to be tactical. Building structure, creating consistency, and moving away from the reactivity, and the make it up as you go approach we've spoke about previously. In fact, when I started getting involved in Ops, it was to bridge a gap, helping my agency mature by creating the systems and controls it needed. But once this is all in a great place, our focus was able to shift to the bigger picture. Our guest today has a strong point of view on this. That operations needs to move beyond the tactical and become strategic. How do you do that? He tells me that you should be looking at your agency model, your governance, your team structure and how you do the work. Today's guest knows that journey well. I'm delighted to be joined by WPP's Global Practice Lead for Strategic Operations, Preston Chandler. He's an expert in guiding agencies from chaos to clarity by fostering a culture of experimentation, removing barriers to creativity and driving sustainable growth. In fact, in this role at WPP, he's responsible for advising agencies in the group on how to operate in a better, smarter, and more strategic way. So whether you're building structure or scaling innovation, this conversation will challenge how you think about operations, how your agency is run, and how to take it to the next level. Let's get into it. Preston, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here.

Preston Chandler:

Thanks for having me, Harv.

Harv Nagra:

I always start by asking Ops leaders how they realized this was their calling and maybe a few highlights from their, from their journey. What was that path like for you? Okay.

Preston Chandler:

Well, we gotta backa little ways. I started off college as a music major. And in my mind, I mean, I did vocal performance and I was going to be able to sing and, and everyone was going to love me.

Harv Nagra:

Yeah.

Preston Chandler:

while I do have a talent for singing, I don't have that talent for singing,

Harv Nagra:

Okay.

Preston Chandler:

being able to be in front of massive audiences every single day. And have people pay for it and pay good money for it. most people who get paid money to, to sing. To sing, didn't go to school for it. So, and I realized that, and I shifted my focus and I had a very wise dad who said, well, you might as well do math or something that you can

Harv Nagra:

Okay, yeah.

Preston Chandler:

I shifted, I have to actually shifted from music to statistics. And then my dad also said, well, you know what operations and how things work and you always liked that. So why don't you do operations? So, all the way back in college, I started recognizing that I

Harv Nagra:

Wow.

Preston Chandler:

really really enjoyed how do things work?

Harv Nagra:

Hmm.

Preston Chandler:

How can you work better. What are like the life hacks for getting work done? So I started off my career more in the lean manufacturing side.

Harv Nagra:

Okay.

Preston Chandler:

shifted over time to, product software development and marketing.

Harv Nagra:

Right.

Preston Chandler:

I, I have to say, I love the thought worker space.

Harv Nagra:

Hmm.

Preston Chandler:

I love just any work that people have to work together to get it done. and that's really intriguing to me and that's what I've, what I've landed on. So for me, you know, marketing, the operations of marketing in agencies, particularly, that's interesting.

Harv Nagra:

hmm.

Preston Chandler:

the projects. It's how do we get people to work well together?

Harv Nagra:

Yeah.

Preston Chandler:

and so again, I, I learned early on that something in this space was what I loved. and about a, about a decade ago, I shifted from actually more than a decade. I'm getting older. I shifted from the manufacturing side of it over to the marketing side of it. And I haven't really looked back.

Harv Nagra:

Wow. And bridging that from manufacturing to marketing. Was that difficult? Or do you think the same kind of principles were transferable?

Preston Chandler:

Well, think you hit on it. It's the principles that are transferable.

Harv Nagra:

Yeah.

Preston Chandler:

I personally, I'm much more principle based. I'm always asking, what's the principle behind this? Why am I doing this? Like, why does this work? And you find that the same things apply. And so in, a marketing environment, we might use something like a design sprint

Harv Nagra:

Right.

Preston Chandler:

or something like that to come up with great ideas. Well, it's the same basic principles, the same basic idea as a Kaizen blitz.

Harv Nagra:

Yep.

Preston Chandler:

talking about manufacturing,

Harv Nagra:

Okay.

Preston Chandler:

Same basic thing, you take a week out, you figure out what the problem is. You come up with ideas, you implement it. That's the same thing. It's the same principles.

Harv Nagra:

Right.

Preston Chandler:

Now, if you used exactly the same practices and tools, then it's not going to work.

Harv Nagra:

Right.

Preston Chandler:

So as long as you keep it principle based, and I think that there's massive, massive overlaps between them.

Harv Nagra:

I love that. I love that. Also that, your journey started back in college. Like a lot of people, they kind of stumble into this career and discover along the way that, Hey, actually I'm really good at fixing stuff and making it run better. But I love that your dad brought that to your awareness and you started looking at it back then. That's really cool. Really interesting. So when you look at agencies, whether they're inside or outside WPP, can you tell us a bit about what you see and what you hear, maybe some common pitfalls that you notice?

Preston Chandler:

I love that. I I'm going to call them bad smells if

Harv Nagra:

Okay. Yeah, right.

Preston Chandler:

Because a bad smell doesn't mean it's actually wrong, per se, and for some organizations that might be the best thing for them to do, but it's a bad smell. It's like, go investigate that, go look at deeper. So, a couple of bad smells, one is there's, there's really a fragmented nature of, of agencies and it gets worse, the larger the organization gets, which is which is to be expected, but you see it in agencies because agencies work for clients. And I think it's curious that, many agencies have a certain way of working for each client. They have three major clients and the agency might operate like three independent companies. And so it causes a lot of this fragmentation. You don't have the same standards. You don't have the same ways of working across all of them. You might have some themes, that go across as your company, particularly your company culture comes to life in those areas, but usually it's not some clear standards. So the fragmentation is first. I think the other one is, we often fall into this pit of hierarchy. Of thinking that hierarchy is important, and it's generally not. I mean there's plenty of research out there that shows, that the more approvers you have on something, the less creative it is. The more senior the people working on it, the less creative it is. so all of these things we say as an industry that we're all about creativity, and yet many of the structures that we put in place don't don't actually foster creativity at all. They do the reverse, they foster more same. We think that that dropping people from from one project to the next project and moving them around a lot, we think that that's going to foster creativity. That is not true. I'm leaving people on the same client for long enough so that they can become experts and they deeply understand the problem, which typically means, you know, a year or two, they need to be on there to, to start really getting that creativity out of them. again, it's, I think maybe the biggest pitfall is, is just that entrenched mindset. we haven't really changed how we operate in the last 30 years. We're operating about the same as we did 30 years ago.

Harv Nagra:

Right.

Preston Chandler:

Um, there's there's another guy. Maybe you should talk to him. He's, he's, he's Jack from Agency Agile.

Harv Nagra:

Okay.

Preston Chandler:

uh, has a really interesting concept of the manager to maker ratio. I think he uses a different word for it, but managers to make a maker. And he says that on the small agencies, often one to 10.

Harv Nagra:

Okay.

Preston Chandler:

one manager and 10 makers. As the agencies get larger, the largest agencies are sitting close to one to one. So it shifts from a 1-to-10

Harv Nagra:

Wow.

Preston Chandler:

to a 1 to 1, and there's a reason why those larger agencies become more and more expensive. It's because their manager to maker ratio is so... you have one manager to one maker. so I think part of that is, as companies get larger, they tend to delegate less. They, don't have as much of the entrepreneurial spirit.

Harv Nagra:

Right.

Preston Chandler:

this idea that, Hey, we can risk stuff and we can, we can try things out. You don't do that as much just because it's a large organization. it's not uncommon

Harv Nagra:

mm hmm.

Preston Chandler:

in large agencies to see these hierarchies, these reporting structures where you have one person reporting to one person reporting to one person reporting

Harv Nagra:

Mm. Yep.

Preston Chandler:

it's a really deep hierarchy without a whole lot of value there. And so finding ways to flatten that, finding ways to delegate more. there's, you've seen this as well as I have. You go into a meeting and have people introduce themselves and people, while I am the senior assistant manager, like they have to say all of their title because we've made it important. And

Harv Nagra:

Right.

Preston Chandler:

If we just took a step back and said, I'm, I'm the designer, like, I don't care. Nobody cares what level of designer you are. It's good enough to know you're the designer, you're the copywriter, or you're the strategist, and yet we try to put all this hierarchy in place.

Harv Nagra:

Right. And a lot of times these kind of ideas, they're not interrogated in the way that you're kind of presenting to us, right? We, we take it as this is the way we've kind of grown through the agency space throughout our careers and what we've seen and just keep repeating those patterns. So sometimes it takes somebody like yourself bringing to our attention that, hey, that, that doesn't mean it's the way it needs to run. So, you know, when people hear the name WPP, there's kind of a sheen associated with that. So we might think that it belongs on a pedestal, every agency in the group. but this is a huge group with lots of different entities, branches around the world. And you don't mandate a single way of working across the group, but, I, I guess my first question may be a bit cheeky. Is there anything that you can say about that rosy perception? Is it earned? Is it fair, or do all agencies have similar issues? you're, you're talking about fragmentation and stuff like that. So my question is, is WPP the exception to the rule because everyone's running exceptionally well.

Preston Chandler:

Unfortunately, not.

Harv Nagra:

Okay.

Preston Chandler:

I'd love to say that we were,

Harv Nagra:

Yeah.

Preston Chandler:

but, but it's just like most other big companies. It's, incredibly large. I mean,

Harv Nagra:

Mm hmm.

Preston Chandler:

WPP as a holding company has over 100, 000 employees worldwide.

Harv Nagra:

Wow.

Preston Chandler:

So you start counting up. That's a lot of people to try to keep going all in the same direction and the nature of a holding company versus operating company relationship means that companies are going to run their own direction.

Harv Nagra:

Right.

Preston Chandler:

And, and just the history of all of these large agencies predominantly growing by acquisition

Harv Nagra:

Mm hmm.

Preston Chandler:

Means that they have hidden under the hood, they have hundreds or thousands of little agencies. That all have their own history of how they've worked, of how they've come together. So, we certainly see pockets of brilliance. I mean, I'll be honest, just say that, yeah, we have some amazing work that we do out of WPP and

Harv Nagra:

Mm hmm.

Preston Chandler:

it's probably pockets of brilliance. I mean, you're going to get some of the good and some of the not as good,

Harv Nagra:

Absolutely. Yep.

Preston Chandler:

and our goal, and we talked about this a bit before, but our goal is to provide enough guidance to people.

Harv Nagra:

Mm.

Preston Chandler:

they can, they can be flexible. I don't think, again, over across a hundred thousand employees, we can't apply a cookie cutter approach to this. Not every client is the same, but you'll get some clients that are, are massive multinational conglomerates like Coca Cola is, is one of the large WPP clients.

Harv Nagra:

Right.

Preston Chandler:

And they're going to operate very different than, some, some single nation company.

Harv Nagra:

Mm hmm.

Preston Chandler:

And so I think again, finding ways, what are the commonalities and we talked just just about manufacturing compared to marketing.

Harv Nagra:

Mm hmm.

Preston Chandler:

I think that same principle-based approach is going to be what helps us out. And so we created a number of playbooks that say, here are the principles that we want to follow. here are some of the bad smells, like here's some things to come and look at. Here are some of the traditional approaches that aren't as good as you might have traditionally thought. And I think, I think helping people to disabuse themselves of those false notions, I think that that goes a long ways.

Harv Nagra:

That's where your role comes in as well for the group, isn't it? Can you tell us what that entails maybe, and, and how, how, how you kind of, activate some of this stuff.

Preston Chandler:

so I have the opportunity to lead what we call strategic operations across the globe. And first I'll just, I'll just describe what we mean by strategic. So my group is not focused on the day to day. We're not focused on the time sheets and, and how you actually bill for, for work and all that kind stuff. We're thinking about the big picture. How do we organize? What are the ways of working?

Harv Nagra:

Mm hmm.

Preston Chandler:

What are the basic scoping approaches? I don't care about the language in the statement of work. I care about what type of a statement of work is this? Is this deliverable based? Is this more of a retainer? That's the things that we end up caring about. Mm And honestly, that's where the big lever is. There's a lot of little levers that people pull all the time on their clients, but the big levers are, how did we scope it? What is our fundamental way of working here? Are we working as teams or are we working as a pool of resources. anyway, so, so we focus on that more strategic side of it. And I have the opportunity to kind of bounce between providing, training and coaching for particular clients or, more of an advising role of, Hey, we're struggling with this, Preston, please come in. How could we approach this differently? What direction could we go? so I ended up coaching a lot of the operations leaders across the network. To give them some of that background, because honestly, many of the operations folks came from the tactical side. They may not have been exposed, or we get a lot of senior people who are wearing the operations hat that came from an account side, and they may not have the full background. It doesn't mean they're doing a bad job, but they may not have that full background. So being able to, to bring to them, here's some of the perspectives, here's some different ways to think about it.

Harv Nagra:

So, so there is that tactical stuff that is important to get kind of your structure under control but, you know, you bring this kind of strategic point of view. Can you tell us some of the benefits and why that's so critical?

Preston Chandler:

for one, I think setting up on a solid foundation makes a big difference. I'll just use that foundation analogy for a bit. if you, if you want to build a 20, 000 square foot house and you have a thousand square foot foundation, it's not going to work.

Harv Nagra:

Right.

Preston Chandler:

yet we have, I think we have many people who try that all the time. Like they have this small foundation and they're trying to build something massive from it

Harv Nagra:

Mm hmm.

Preston Chandler:

we just need to make sure that we have the correct or appropriate foundation.

Harv Nagra:

Right.

Preston Chandler:

That's what you want to achieve. Okay, here, here's the fundamental building blocks that we have to put in place to make that happen. Which could be things again, like, like what is your scoping approach? How are we going to scope this? Does that actually fit with this client for what you're trying to do?

Harv Nagra:

So you've developed some playbooks or points of view. We're going to go through that. But, you know, if I understand correctly, this isn't about identifying the right model, there is no right model, but it's kind of, helping someone figure out how The kind of agency they want to be and, you might think that's obvious, but why is that so important for somebody to think about?

Preston Chandler:

you mentioned it earlier is that we're not interrogating this enough, and that we're often just implementing what we saw last. but again, every client is going to be a little bit different. We certainly see some similarities across clients, but every, every client needs a tailored approach for them. How's this going to work? We have clients who who want to work with us, who are going to be embedded on teams with us,

Harv Nagra:

Right.

Preston Chandler:

clients who say, you know what? You're the vendor. I'm the client. I don't care if you do it in a black box. Those are very different, very different approaches. We need to look at that very differently. It's not going to be the same foundation for both of those. We're building very different things. One's a house and one is a warehouse or

Harv Nagra:

Yeah. Yeah, and I think it goes back to what we were saying a few moments ago, that you have ended up in a certain kind of circumstance or structure or whatever, and you do need to make sure you're making the right decisions for your way forward. So, Preston, we're going to go through each of these areas that you've identified. I, I think it would be great to get a bit of a definition from you on what that is and maybe even some examples that come to mind that can help us illustrate what falls into those categories. The first one we'd spoke about was the agency model. Can you tell us what that means and what that kind of looks like?

Preston Chandler:

this is particularly important for the larger agencies. So if, if you're a single agency, and you don't, you're not necessarily working with other agencies to help out the client, then, then this answer is pretty much already made for you.

Harv Nagra:

Yeah.

Preston Chandler:

you have one agency,

Harv Nagra:

Yeah.

Preston Chandler:

But when we're working from a, a holding company perspective, we need to understand how are we organizing the agencies here?

Harv Nagra:

Hmm.

Preston Chandler:

Do we have one lead agency who's fully responsible and they bring in some other people? Do we have a collection of agencies that all have to work together and there's not one boss and they have to kind of manage this by committee and just get along. we also have some where no one agency owns it

Harv Nagra:

hmm.

Preston Chandler:

And it's kind of on demand. We're just going to go, we're just going to pick some, some people from different agencies where we're going to assign a project to that agency, a project to that agency. And then the last one would be much more of a bespoke model where we, we essentially create an agency for that client.

Harv Nagra:

Right.

Preston Chandler:

we say like this, this agency is going to operate just for you. which, which we might do for someone like like Ford or Coca Cola

Harv Nagra:

Right.

Preston Chandler:

yep, you have your own agency. they're going to operate pretty independently just for you.

Harv Nagra:

That makes sense. The point here is there's no right model. It's just to have a sense check about how you're structured and how you wanna operate.

Preston Chandler:

Well, yes and no.

Harv Nagra:

Okay. Go on.

Preston Chandler:

There are models that tend to work better.

Harv Nagra:

tell me about that.

Preston Chandler:

So it's hard to say the right, but, I just described like this, this ad hoc model, and we're just going to pick and choose. It's not a very efficient model. Can we make it work? Certainly. It's not very efficient. There's not a whole lot of cohesion. You don't have this tribal knowledge built up over time that people learn how to work with a certain client.

Harv Nagra:

Hmm.

Preston Chandler:

So can you be successful? Certainly we see agencies be successful that route. Would you be more successful going a different route? Yeah.

Harv Nagra:

Okay.

Preston Chandler:

If you're looking at more of a federated model where you have mulitple different agencies, that can work but management by committee is tough and it's hard to have a single vision of where you're going. And so what we often find is just more silos. at least the people are dedicated to the work longterm, but there's more silos. Um, the lead agency can work really well. If, the work is predominantly with one agency and you have very little need for other agencies. but as soon as you start needing other agencies more, this, disparity in power doesn't tend to work very well. Having one agency is like, no, no, I set all the rules and you will do what I tell you. That doesn't work.

Harv Nagra:

I've seen that as well. There's a bit of competition and clashing opinions, and this kind of ego thing comes into play, doesn't it?

Preston Chandler:

Exactly. Exactly. So for, for WPP with large clients, it generally makes more sense to have a bespoke model

Harv Nagra:

Okay. Yeah.

Preston Chandler:

create a somewhat standalone agency for them to say, Hey, we're going to have that, Mm-hmm operate independently on your behalf. It generally works the best. It doesn't mean that there is one right model, but it's pretty clear that with all the other benefits from it, a bespoke model is generally going to be better.

Harv Nagra:

Question, some of our audience or maybe even a large proportion of the audience might only be in that single agency model, is there anything that you can highlight in that structure that would be things to look out for?

Preston Chandler:

Yeah. Even in the, in the single agency model, you can still suffer from seeing things like silos. You probably still have creative departments and strategy departments and, and if they can't operate together, then you might as well be a federated model. You might as well be completely separate agencies if that's how you're operating.

Harv Nagra:

Good point.

Preston Chandler:

you still need to take care not to fall into the trap of some of the other areas. I would recommend, even if you're a small agency, you're probably better off thinking of yourself as, I'm creating a mini agency for that client.

Harv Nagra:

Right.

Preston Chandler:

So what is my agency for that client with everybody on the same page? We have one leader for that client instead of having five different leaders.

Harv Nagra:

Good advice. All right, so let's move into the second area, which was governance.

Preston Chandler:

So how are you going to, how are you going to lead it? And I just, I just touched on it a bit, but are you going to have one leader for this? Are you gonna have multiple leaders for this agency model that you've selected? How are you going to empower that leader? Do you have a leader who's a figurehead?

Harv Nagra:

Mm hmm.

Preston Chandler:

yeah, you have a point of contact, but they can't make really any choices.

Harv Nagra:

Right.

Preston Chandler:

just a point of contact. If I need to escalate, I'll go to them, but they don't lead any strategy or vision, or they don't say this is where we're going as a partnership. So I think the governance is really important to understand where are you and where do you want to be? again, there's not really one right answer, but there, there are some commonly better answers.

Harv Nagra:

Okay.

Preston Chandler:

So, having more of this empowered alignment is the epitome, to me. You're empowering people but you still have this central structure that provides alignment and we say, yes, we all are going in the same direction. You're empowered over your sphere or whatever you're responsible for. You're empowered to operate there, but we're all going in the same direction as opposed to like a figurehead where there's there's no empowerment. Yeah, everybody's going in their own direction, but it's kind of almost anarchy chaos. They're running, there is, there is no guidance.

Harv Nagra:

Preston, so my question is like, we're going to talk about team structure, which is kind of the next pillar. But how does this differ from that? Can you just kind of spell that out for me? How does governance differ from team structure?

Preston Chandler:

the way I would define team is the people actually doing the work. So, I think that that's probably the biggest pitfall that I hear from people is that they describe team and it's like the leadership. Or the team is strategy. Or the team is creative. And I'm sorry, they can't act like a team. That's like saying that you have a team full of quarterbacks. That's that's not a team. That's a bunch of quarterbacks. let's let's assume that you have two or three teams. The governance is how do you lead those teams? Not how do the teams operate in themselves?

Harv Nagra:

Let's go into team structure then, talk us through that and what you've seen work well and not so well? what are the problems that, it might be quite easy to spell out some of the problems that you see.

Preston Chandler:

well, so I think just reiterating on the point I made earlier is that the team is the people doing the work. And it's all the people needed to do that work. Typically that means you have five to nine people. I mean, there's, there's, a lot of human psychology behind that. We really only connect with about seven people at once. So keep the teams to about seven people.

Harv Nagra:

Right.

Preston Chandler:

And and then the tough thing is making sure that those seven people have all the skills necessary to do the work.

Harv Nagra:

Mhm.

Preston Chandler:

So if you're doing a traditional, doing a traditional campaign,

Harv Nagra:

Mhm.

Preston Chandler:

to need strategy and design and copy

Harv Nagra:

Yep.

Preston Chandler:

potentially media

Harv Nagra:

Mhm.

Preston Chandler:

same team. Well, that's four people and maybe some of those roles are doubled up. and maybe you need a production or, or, or project manager with that, but that becomes your team and it's best to have that team be fully empowered to make the decisions. In fact, I recommend putting the client on the team. if you, if you are working with a client and they have a marketer that you're working with, pull them onto the team. Don't treat them as someone outside the team. Show them the dirty laundry. Show them how the sausage is made. Have them be part of that. Include them in ideation sessions and talk to them every single day. Yep. That's a very different type of experience. Than what we often see traditionally when traditionally the team talks to the account person. The account person then conveys it over to the client. The client conveys it back to the account. It's a telephone game and it's so much easier if you just say no. We're 1 team. We're operating together. So that, dedicated cross functional team is the ideal team structure again It's not the only answer or always the right answer, but generally that's the better answer. Some other ways that I see this is we do have project teams where a project comes up this is the most common I think, a project comes up and I go and find people to fill the project. That feels very common and normal for agency folks. If you want to be almost twice as productive, don't do that. So that's really wasteful in the long run.

Harv Nagra:

Why do you think that is?

Preston Chandler:

Well, for one, you have to spend all that time and effort staffing up for a project. Now, what if you had a team and you just happened to assign projects to the team? Team already exists. They already know how to work together. Again, studies show that it takes about three to six months for a team to figure out how to work together. To go through the, forming, storming, norming, performing, that takes three to six months. The average length of an agency project, three to six

Harv Nagra:

Three to six months. Yeah.

Preston Chandler:

by the time that they figure out how to work with each other,

Harv Nagra:

Yeah. You dissolve it and yeah, dissolving it and starting over ends up being very inefficient, doesn't it?

Preston Chandler:

Yeah. So one, resourcing becomes much easier when you don't have to do staffing all the time. And then two people are so much more efficient when they are working together long term and I get to figure out how you, Harv, work. And what makes you tick, and I'm like, oh, I don't actually have to overexplain this all. We don't need all of these meetings because I can just, I can just send a note to Harv and he gets it. But early on, if you don't have that long lived team, if you haven't worked for them with them for three to six months, you're going to have to over communicate to make things happen.

Harv Nagra:

So it's creating kind of a pod structure then in, in your agency, right? so that you can just feed them projects and they're a little bit more autonomous and you're not doing this kind of entity level resourcing. You're doing it on a pod basis is, is that about right?

Preston Chandler:

Absolutely. And we might describe them as pods or teams or squads. Again, I care about the principle that they're cross functional, that they're together. The name that you use for them, use whatever you want.

Harv Nagra:

Okay.

Preston Chandler:

Several years ago, I was responsible for the staffing and resourcing for technology. And when I got in, 10 of the technologists were on one team or one project and 90 of them were on multiple. projects And and we were spending so much time every week, just trying to figure out what is the staffing and resourcing and oh, we need three more hours over here with this person and 10 hours with this person. And it was, was like 40 hours a week. Every week of some senior people's time, like, this is like CTO level that you have to involve their time multiple hours a week, trying to figure out resourcing over a couple of months. And we just, we just rationalized where all the resources going and we said, we're going to prioritize a person having one client, a person being a hundred percent dedicated to something, and we prioritized that. And over the course of just a couple of months, we inverted the statistic. We had 90 percent of the people working on a single client or project

Harv Nagra:

Right.

Preston Chandler:

And 10 percent of the people floating. And it became so easy to manage. We stopped all of those resourcing meetings; just disappeared. We

Harv Nagra:

Interesting.

Preston Chandler:

didn't need them anymore. And we said, hey, individual managers, you only have a couple of people to resource for.

Harv Nagra:

Mm-hmm

Preston Chandler:

only have 10 percent of the people to resource for you guys can figure it out. And so we didn't have to do all that big management anymore. It was not as much of a headache. And it really wasn't as hard as people put it out to be. We just had to make that priority and say, you know what we value fully dedicated over fully utilized. People were looking way too much about, you know, billability is this person a hundred percent billable. And that's what they were concerned about. And that actually wasted a whole lot more money for us as an organization.

Harv Nagra:

Super interesting. In terms of kind of who heads up these kind of pods, is there any good answers there? Is it a creative director or creative lead or an account lead? Any kind of advice there?

Preston Chandler:

Commonly, again, there's not one right answer, but commonly we see this be either account for project management. That's the most common. it doesn't have to be. One of my favorite pods ever. The junior creative was the lead. It was, it was fantastic. We went through training and in training, we played a game and, and it really started to show what is the mindset that people have. And this, this one guy, his mindset was, he kept asking the group,"let's go back to the basics. And what did we say we were going to do? How did we say we were going to operate? We should probably do that. Let's be wise about this." And he constantly said that he was the junior person, Mm. but he was constantly, this is, this is just how he thought. And we get towards the end of the training. And, and I the team had account, the project management. And I went to them and said, Hey, at this guy, his name's Scott, by the way. So I was like look at Scott, see how he's behaving. That's exactly what we want from a team lead. Are you okay empowering him to be the team lead? At first there was a bit of I don't know about that. Like, he's the creative, like creatives don't do that. And eventually he said, okay, Preston, we'll trust you. We'll try this out. And he was just fantastic. And he could be the team lead. The team lead is a hat to wear. It's not a title. It's just a hat to wear. What was really cool though was that his boss was also on the team. And so I I put just as much praise on his boss for being willing to, to act as the team member and not try to take charge.

Harv Nagra:

I love that.

Preston Chandler:

And it, it was just amazing. And he was an art director, designer, he could do the work. So for me, again, this is much more about looking at who has that aptitude. You'll find project managers or account people who don't have that aptitude. Mm So don't try to force them to do it. someone who has the aptitude for it because all they have do is focus on the team, and make sure that the team has regular meetings. And, they might do a little bit of facilitating and making sure that people are talking and looking at the big picture. But it's not, it's not a huge effort. You just have to have somebody who does it.

Harv Nagra:

And it goes back to your point earlier about hierarchy as well. We get too caught up in that and job titles and get too rigid rather than recognizing that, hey, this could work really well if that person that's showing that aptitude and enthusiasm is willing to do it, right? Yeah.

Preston Chandler:

it, it, it honestly forces us to be so much more human centered. Who is the human? What does this group of people need? If you create a team with seven people, no two groups of seven people are going to be the same.

Harv Nagra:

Absolutely.

Preston Chandler:

They're all going to be a bit different. And so you need to interrogate. For this group, what makes the most sense? I will say on a group of 10 or a group of seven, as the teams mature, I rarely see both a dedicated account and a dedicated project manager. Usually you end up getting one of them dedicated and the other is like floating across multiple teams. And I've seen both situations. I've seen where the project manager is dedicated and kind of runs the team and the account person is, is floating. I've also seen where the account person is dedicated and runs the team and the project manager is floating. I don't see those as being much better than each other. They're both just fine. Yeah. But I think it's interesting that, that as teams improve and evolve, they shift toward this, it's about one to seven manager to maker ratio. That tends to be about, about a good balance.

Harv Nagra:

Okay, Excellent. So we're moving into the final area, which is, how you do the work. I suppose the capabilities and the outputs that you're producing. So tell us about that, what to look for and pitfalls and all that kind of stuff.

Preston Chandler:

Yeah. we often talk about this as ways of working, what is the way you get the work done, and I mean, my background comes from, from lean and agile and all this kind of stuff. And so I just assumed that you do either lean or agile. but as I started to put together some, some of these playbooks and I said, you know what, I'm really going to go and look, I'm going to make sure that there's not other options out there. And guess what, there aren't other options. You can either do ad hoc, which means it's chaos. You just do whatever. You can purposely do something that's more waterfall, meaning it's very, very stage gate. And I have to do all of this stage before I can move to the next stage.

Harv Nagra:

Yeah.

Preston Chandler:

or you can do lean, or you can do agile. And those are it. Everything else kind of falls under those Mm umbrellas. And, and honestly, if you want to be effective, efficient, then you need to be agile and or lean. That's that's it. That's it, that's the only things you can do. if you are more production oriented if it's if you're in a situation where there's just lots of small things that you're working through.

Harv Nagra:

Mm hmm.

Preston Chandler:

You should probably do more lean. And if you're in an area where you're doing lots of lots of projects and it requires lots of cross functional work and stuff, you should be more agile.

Harv Nagra:

Mm hmm.

Preston Chandler:

And, you know, there's different tools and practices can use from each area You But, you would be better off going in one of those areas than sticking with the tried and true, waterfall agency approach.

Harv Nagra:

Excellent. So let's say we have gone through this exercise, to identify who we are in each of these areas and what feels or is going to be best for our organization. I mean, with that information in hand, where do you go from there? Like, what do you do with that?

Preston Chandler:

Then comes the comes the hard part. Of actually doing it. And so uh, my work is usually split in two ways one is educating people on what are the options? What are the, what are the different levers that you can pull? Oh, you want it to be this type of an agency? Yeah. I think that'll fit you well. You want to have this type of ways of working? Yeah. Okay. and then actually bringing it to life is hard, it's tough, and that requires change. And, um, I think that we have done ourselves a disservice over the last 30 years from a change management perspective, because we've allowed people to start thinking that change management is about putting together a presentation deck. If I put a presentation deck together, if I do a couple of emails, if I have a town hall, I'm good to go. We've managed the change. That's not true. That's not how humans change. so what I find is much more effective is by having the embedded coaches. And you, you mentioned this earlier is having those coaches, having much more of a mentoring behavior. I find that it's pretty easy to help a team change Mm if we will first do a little bit of training. So depending on how big the change is, we might need more or less training. But at most we typically need, if a team wants to go from traditional approaches to a very, you know, cross functional team, empowered agile approach. It usually takes about two days of training. So you do the training, then the most important part is the coaching. And so for the next several weeks, actually being with the team and saying, okay, you used to have status meetings. We're not doing that anymore. We're doing something different. We're going to have a standup meeting. And this is what a standup meeting is. This is how it's different from what you're used to. And showing them, this is how it's different. And then letting them do it while, while I watch and I'm able to say, you did this thing, but here, let me let me maybe tweak that a little bit. Let's let's shift some of your behaviors to be more aligned with where we want to go.

Harv Nagra:

Mm.

Preston Chandler:

So that that coaching becomes really really important. It has to be one on one or one to one, I should say. It can be, it can be one coach, the team, but it has to have that relationship. You can't, you can't make it work by putting it all in the presentation deck and handing it to somebody and saying, go.

Harv Nagra:

Absolutely, yeah.

Preston Chandler:

That's not very successful.

Harv Nagra:

And so we've done all this work to identify who we want to be, but we don't magically become that thing by just identifying it, right. There's, there's a whole lot of work that unpacks that you need to tackle systematically to make all of that realistic and embed it into your team and your ways of working.

Preston Chandler:

Yeah. And as much as possible, you need to, if you're, if you're doing the change management, like my role, it's not to define everything for the people, because if you do that, it's going to fail long term. They might adopt it for the moment, but as soon as some obstacle comes up, Yeah. then they'll say, we're going to go back to the old way of working so that the better approach is to teach them the right principles. So here's all the principles. And then together, let's figure out how do we bring this to life. Mm So it becomes their solution, it's not Preston's solution anymore. In fact, I hate hearing that. I'm like, if I hear that, oh, this is Preston's process. I'm like, I failed.

Harv Nagra:

Yeah.

Preston Chandler:

failed. Let's go back to the drawing board. I failed. needs to be their process. They need to own it. I should be able to come back to a team six months later and see the things that they've improved that I never taught them. Like they should be empowered and coming up with ideas all on their own.

Harv Nagra:

so, people can go and find coaches and so on. What else can you do to figure some of this stuff out. I suppose you could go read a book or, or watch stuff on YouTube. Like, do you have any advice on other areas people can kind of learn and start embedding this stuff?

Preston Chandler:

well, even if you don't want to, the best option is a coach.

Harv Nagra:

Okay. It's just the most efficient in your point of view.

Preston Chandler:

most efficient, most, the best.

Harv Nagra:

Okay.

Preston Chandler:

Part of the problem with having the book, so there's plenty of books to read.

Harv Nagra:

Yeah. I've got a pile on my shelf back there that I've either yet to read or yet to figure out how to implement.

Preston Chandler:

The most effective is going to be a coach, particularly somebody who's seen a lot of different situations. And so they can, they can tell you, Oh, this is what I've seen in other teams. Because, like, like I said multiple times today, it's not a cookie cutter approach.

Harv Nagra:

Mm hmm.

Preston Chandler:

So you need a coach who's seen more of those things. then, yeah, I do think there's plenty of opportunity. Just stay curious. Go research. Go and, go and ask what somebody else has done. Don't fall into the pit of doing it just because you read it in a book. That's, that's a bad approach. Learn from the book. Ask what principles are they, are they using. And then the last recommendation I have is to hold retrospectives. So a retrospective is an agile term. It just means to reflect on behavior. I recommend a team reflects every two weeks and says, what's something we could do different. And with that reflection, with a little bit of that curiosity, you will find that six months, a year later, your team is very different. And you've actually owned. all the change. And you're learning more through that than you ever could through books. So, so just make some changes, ask some people, try some stuff out.

Harv Nagra:

Absolutely, and I think that retrospective idea is so important because, if you're not doing that, you're just continuing to run on the hamster wheel without fixing anything, and then a year goes by and nothing's actually changed, and you're just identifying that the problems are getting bigger and bigger. So that's really good advice and really easy to implement as well, right? Cause it's not this monumental exercise you're having to undertake. It's just constantly checking in and iterating, which is, which is quite agile.

Preston Chandler:

Yup, and it can be, it can be like 15 minutes, it's not a formal meeting, just pause and say, as a team, what's one thing we can work on? What do we wanna improve this week?

Harv Nagra:

Definitely good advice. So, with all this work, we've, we've gone through this exercise and we've identified all these kinds of sub projects that we need to undertake. Somebody might, say, well, how do I put my, business as usual on hold to go through this amount of work? It sounds really overwhelming. I suppose, the coach comes in handy because then they can nudge you along. But what would you say to somebody that's feeling a bit overwhelmed by that kind of daunting undertaking?

Preston Chandler:

I often say don't boil the ocean. At the same time, though, Yeah. the best way to approach change is to jump in feet first. Like, like just go in all the way, just putting your toe in, trying to do a little bit at a time. That's, that's more prone to failure. You don't reap the rewards nearly as fast and it's easy to back out and be like, I don't really want to. If you're already jumped in, you're done.

Harv Nagra:

Yeah.

Preston Chandler:

So if you want to make the change, my recommendation is to just bite the bullet. Take a couple of days.

Harv Nagra:

Yeah.

Preston Chandler:

This doesn't need to be months, you can do amazing stuff in just a couple of days.

Harv Nagra:

That's fair, yeah.

Preston Chandler:

Take a days with your team, do a little bit of training, coaching. Say we have the old world from before this, and we have the new world after this. What are we going to do in the new world? Let's change as many processes as possible. Let's make sure they're all aligned and then let's, let's move forward. and then yeah, you might lose a couple of days, in my experience, you gain that back within weeks. But you invested two days within a couple of weeks, you will have gained that back. pretty much every team that I've ever coached in the marketing space for, for ways of working, agile, cross functional team, all that kind of stuff. They, all of them have become at least 2x as productive. So they're doing twice as much work with the same number of people. It pays itself back fast. So, so look at it as an investment. Don't look at it like, I have to take time off. No, this is an investment. You're sharpening the axe so that you can cut more trees.

Harv Nagra:

what I loved about what you said is a nice reminder that this doesn't mean it's three or six months of full time focus. This is a couple of days of you clearing your schedule to do some meaningful thinking and planning, right?

Preston Chandler:

Yeah. Yeah. one thing I like to say is, you know, when's the best time to plant a tree? Well, it was 20 years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is today. Just go and do it. Don't keep putting it off. I get a lot of people who say, well, Preston, it's, it's not the best time at the moment. Let's put that off for a couple of months. And business as usual is rough. Business as usual is always going to be rough. Like there's always going to be excuses. Just make the investment today. So that you have freed up time in the future.

Harv Nagra:

Really good advice. So, Preston, when is a good time for an agency to undertake this process? Is it everything someone should do, well, as soon as they hear this podcast is one example, but at a certain interval, or is it triggered by growing pains? What's your point of view on this?

Preston Chandler:

it must be constant. Maybe 30 years ago. You could do it every couple of years, but the rate of change has just increased in the world. You You can't afford to ever be stagnant ever again. I think it's not so much about change and thinking that this is a project that will be done. It's, this is, this is, we're beginning a journey. And the journey has no end in sight because I don't know when and where it's going to end. It'll probably end when the company dies. Like that's it. So you got to keep moving. It's, it's shifting to have a culture of continuous change and improvement and that the retrospectives are ideal for that. It's like, we're just going to have retrospectives. We're always going to come up with new things to change, new ways to improve.

Harv Nagra:

That's really interesting. I wasn't expecting you to say continuously but it makes so much sense now that I think about it. so we're coming to the end of our chat. I just wondered if you have any predictions for where you think that agency space is gonna go, which is a nice kind of, extension of the last question.

Preston Chandler:

Well, I think probably on top of most people's minds is AI. And I think that AI will be a massive disruptor for good and for bad. There's going to be some agencies that, that, adapt and adopt and move forward, and there's going to be some agencies that just can't figure it out. I think that, that we will start seeing a bunch of smaller agencies who figure it out all of a sudden explode, they're going to grow rapidly because they figure out that they can grow faster with AI supporting them and they don't have to have the same infrastructure. They don't have to have all the same hiring practices to be able to ramp up for clients. So I really think we're going to see that. we're probably going to see the big players continue on this steady adoption curve of adopting more and more AI. They can't move as fast as some of the small players, but some of the small players just don't have the resources needed. So it'll be an interesting game to see played out, to see how people move and, and, and change, but it will absolutely bring change. I believe that if we do it well, or the agencies that do it well are going to be more and more agile. They're going to realize that, that AI, for instance, allows them to move much quickly. It allows them to reduce silos, and to bring people together. And the agencies that figure that out, the agencies that are like, yep, we're going to have a cross functional team. We're not going to worry about projects. We're just going to have the team and the team is going to work on projects. Those are the agencies that are going to. They're going to spring forward.

Harv Nagra:

I love that. Thank you for that. so Preston, the kind of coaching and advising you do internally, is that also something that you support other organizations with?

Preston Chandler:

Yeah, yeah. I, my, my partner and I have a consulting firm on the side. and we do coaching for other organizations. There's some conflict of interest. So, sometimes I can't directly coach you and my, my partner does because there's a conflict of interest. But, but in general, yeah, happy to, to help and coach. my partner and I love running workshops. We love helping organizations figure out what direction they're going and doing coaching and training. that's, that's what we're here for.

Harv Nagra:

Excellent. So where can people go find out more information about you and your business then?

Preston Chandler:

you can look me up on LinkedIn. So Preston Chandler on LinkedIn. You can also check us out on Centered.work. www.centered.work. and we are just launching our second book. So if you want the first book, you, you can find that it's called the Agile Code.

Harv Nagra:

Yes.

Preston Chandler:

Shameless plug. That's the Agile Code. our second book that just barely launched on Amazon like last Friday, is Breakthrough Innovation. And so the agile code focuses much more on, on team ways of working, like how to lead teams, all their ways of working and then breakthrough innovation is, is more from an organizational perspective. how do you approach that? how do you structure an organization so that you get innovation?

Harv Nagra:

Excellent. I'm looking forward to that. We'll put a link to all of the above in our episode notes so everyone can find that. Preston, it's been an absolute pleasure having you here today. Thank you so much for your time.

Preston Chandler:

Happy to help. Thanks for having me.

Harv Nagra:

Hey all, I think Preston brought up a really great point. As organizations, we've ended up wherever we are today, and we don't often take the time to think about whether we've ended up at the right place for who we're striving to be, and whether there could be more optimal ways of structuring our businesses that could pay dividends. A nd as operations folks, we might find ourselves too often getting pulled into the weeds when we're optimizing processes and solving problems than looking at the big picture. Preston's point was that we absolutely need to get out of the weeds and be strategic. Maybe naive of me, but I really didn't expect Preston to say that we should be looking at this as a continual process. I was expecting him to say, do it now, and then do it annually. But I realize how much more value it opens up if we're constantly testing, monitoring, and iterating. To recap, the areas that Preston recommends that we look at to see if they're fit for purpose in our agencies are your agency structure, governance, team structure, and ways of working. Then once you've identified who you want to be in each of these areas, doing the hard work to get there. That being said, I was reassured to be reminded that none of this means putting your life on hold for months while you work through all of this. Clear out a couple of days to run some strategy workshops and do some thinking, and all of this towards becoming a better run organization that's able to be more efficient and profitable. So, if you want a cheat sheet of Preston's advice, then you'll know that you can sign up for the handbook, operations newsletter, so you never miss an episode, or the key action points each of our guests has to share. Sign up at scoro.com/podcast and scroll down to find the sign up form. And if you've loved this episode and enjoy this podcast, there's loads of things you can be doing to share your love. For example, share the episode with co workers and friends who would appreciate the content and ask them to subscribe. You can become part of the conversation by commenting on the posts that I share on LinkedIn about the episode with your point of view and what you appreciated from the conversation. Or you can rate the podcast on Apple or Spotify. That's it for me. I'll be back with the next episode soon.

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