Is it difficult for you to delegate to your team? Are you still handling everything yourself? Does your team feel empowered to take the initiative or do more work? If you’re still at the center of everything, it's time to unlearn your old ways and elevate your team. When you do, you'll experience limitless agency growth. Today's guest thought clients expected to work directly with her and therefore found it hard to step away from daily operations. However, she learned to let go of this limiting mindset and embrace collaborative work. It was a humbling experience to see how much empowering her team made everything better. Now she finally gets to focus on strategy, growth, and agency culture.

Julianne Fraser is the founder of Dialogue New York, a digital marketing consultancy specializing in building influencer marketing strategies for lifestyle brands. For five years her agency has worked with corporate giants like Adidas and startups like Brooklinen amplifying their stories through influential voices.

In this episode, we’ll discuss:

Growing agency employee growth paths.
Building a collaborative approach to improve client relationships.
Elevating your team to develop strategy on their own.
Keeping high standards of quality as the agency grows.

Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM

Sponsors and Resources

E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design, and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service.

What Influenced the Vision for an Influencer Marketing Agency?

Julianne got into the industry just as brands started to understand the power of social media. She worked as a consultant at a startup accelerator where she gained valuable insight into the art of building client relationships. In her career, she laid the foundation of strategy work for many startups. Since then, influencer marketing has become a bigger part of marketing budgets. Just last year, investment in this area added up to over $16 million.

Working at several companies over the years, she also learned there are varying approaches to influencer marketing. The PR Approach, understanding relationships and creativity but no measurable results, Performance Marketing Approach, where they measure returns but no creative strategy, and the Automated Influencer Marketing Approach.

Having done all three approaches throughout her career, Julianne felt there was an opportunity to develop a strategy that incorporated all their benefits.

Her agency officially opened its doors in 2017 as a solo venture operating from Julianne's apartment. After 6 months her first hire was someone to handle execution. That time gave her a solid perspective on the ins and outs of all aspects of the operations; this was very useful as she grew her team.

How to Develop Agency Employee Growth Paths

Julianne felt humbled by the experience of hiring and mentoring a team. It’s been one of the greatest challenges but also one she greatly enjoys. Her view on how to hire, train, and manage has changed with experience. In the beginning, she mostly hired based on skill. Now, however, she’s learned the importance of culture fit and having a team that’s excited to learn.

In this sense, she admits to being old school in her approach to employee growth in the agency. Initially, new hires in coordinator junior roles were promoted to associate or manager after a couple of months. Now, however, she crafts her team’s growth by catering to their passions and talents.

She credits her business coach for teaching her the benefits of coaching her team for the role they want. Basically, getting people with very different abilities – whether for customer service, negotiations, or systems – on the same growth track will just ensure they’ll get bored and leave. It was a limiting belief based on old-school conceptions of growth and it took years to unlearn it.

Now she pinpoints each team member’s zone of genius and develops individual growth plans for them. It has worked wonders and helped her increase retention and creating a great culture at her agency.

Building a Collaborative Approach to Improve Client Relationships

For the longest time, Julianne was convinced she had to manage all client relationships. Like many agency owners, she believed clients were coming specifically to work with her. It was an old-school limiting belief that got in the way of her agency’s growth. Furthermore, she thought she should be the one developing all the strategy work for clients.

Fortunately, she realized the agency would grow by adopting a different approach. Building trust with clients is very important to the relationship, so there was a lot of work put into training. As to the strategy work, instead of doing it from start to finish, Julianne could break it into stages. Bringing in team members with expertise in creative concepts or copywriting transformed the process into a collaborative approach.

Today, she is completely out of client management and process. She solely focuses on strategy and growth. It has completely changed her role as an agency owner.

It was a humble awakening when Julianne realized she didn’t have to do everything herself and how much stronger the work is when the team collaborates.

Elevating Your Agency Team to Develop Strategy On Their Own

Julianne believes when teaching her team about strategy, why is more important than how. She explains the why can is related to the answers to these questions: What’s the client’s personality? Who are they reporting to? What do they care about?

In their training sessions, she pays special attention to whether her team notices relevant details. For example, if a client feels pressure from their CEO, she asks the follow-up question “How can we ease that for them?” These very subtle elements that don’t feel that important are crucial for Julianne.

When it comes to strategy, many agencies churn out the same copy/paste plans. However, Julianne is constantly challenging her team to break out from the norm. For her, every single detail that goes into the strategy must offer some sort of value.

Her team puts a lot of effort into building custom strategy for a specific client. Developing a competitive analysis is not that hard but adopting that unique mentality is what really made a difference in the quality of their work.

Keeping High Standards of Quality As Your Agency Grows

Julianne runs the type of agency where employees are judged more on results than the amount of time spent working. What she does expect of her team is maintaining the quality of work at 95% to 100%. Everything they put out has to be at the level of something she’d created herself or, ideally, better.

It’s important to keep high standards of quality as you grow your team and clients because it’s very common for agencies to allow quality to slide as workload increases. Of course, it’s not the same having two clients as having ten but that’s where teamwork and training come in. Be very thorough in your training and ensure your team is constantly striving to provide the best service.

For her, strategy is more than just the initial kickoff. They do put together a comprehensive strategy as a roadmap for a year-long engagement. However, she encourages her team to think about what’s coming down the pike every three months. They should ask themselves, is this too simple? Should we reinvigorate with fresh ideas? Do we need to pivot and change? This constant effort of always offering fresh ideas is what Julianne believes retains clients for long periods of time.

Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset?

If you want to be around amazing agency owners that can see what you may not be able to see and help you grow your agency, go to Agency Mastery 360. Our agency growth program helps you take a 360-degree view of your agency and gain mastery of the 3 pillar systems (attract, convert, scale) so you can create predictability, wealth, and freedom.

Unlock Limitless Agency Growth By Empowering Your Team

Smart Agency Masterclass with Jason Swenk: Podcast for Digital Marketing Agencies