Applying Scrum to Inbound Servicing with Jeremy Knight

Jeremy Knight is the founder of Equinet Media, a 10-person inbound and content marketing agency in Bedford, UK, and a HubSpot partner for five years at the time. Before agencies he sold a quarter of a million records (the story starts with busking under the Arc de Triomphe at 19) and spent years in B2B publishing. Andrew Dymski hosted, episode 85 of Inbound Agency Journey. The conversation covers the project management tools Equinet burned through, EOS, and eight months of applying agile scrum to inbound delivery.

Four tools later, the problem was how they organized themselves

Equinet’s 10 people all work on site, after painful attempts to do it with freelancers. The software history is just as long.

We’ve had our fair share of pain trying to find the ways in doing that. We’ve been through Mavenlink, we’ve tried Zoho, we’ve been through Basecamp, we were with TimeFox for a while. We’ve tried lots of ways of organizing ourselves and come to the realization along the line that it’s probably more about how we organize ourselves rather than organizing around a piece of software.

(Listen at 05:30)

It seems obvious from the other side, Jeremy said, but it wasn’t while he was in it. He’d believed the tools could fix everything. It’s what you bring to the tools, not the tools themselves.

Self-implementing EOS with Gino Wickman’s videos, then paying for an implementer

Jeremy saw the Traction team at INBOUND, read the book, forgot about it, read Get a Grip, forgot about it again, then started feeling the pain of growing. EOS is probably built for companies bigger than Equinet, he said, but it pulls good ideas into a format that hangs together, a bit like HubSpot does for inbound. So at the start of the year they self-implemented.

I thought I was very clever by actually getting onto the implementer course and using the videos of Gino Wickman actually teaching implementers, and that’s how we did it at first. We self-implemented using Gino as our implementer… To a certain extent it worked, but I just could feel that we were making mistakes along the way and we weren’t necessarily self-correcting. And I just thought, well, let’s bite the bullet and invest in an implementer. We’ll see if this is going to help, and boy did it help.

(Listen at 08:51)

The implementer was one of only two in the UK at the time. So far it’s just the three-person leadership team doing quarterlies with him, and Jeremy said it accelerated the year’s improvement more than anything else.

A week inside Square 2 made scrum for inbound click

I had the great fortune of being invited to Agency Week by Mike Lieberman from Square 2 last November, and I spent a week there shadowing the agency and saw them just as they were implementing agile and their scrums, or hives, were beginning to do that… And that’s where the penny really dropped for me, that taking an agile scrum approach to inbound could absolutely be done.

(Listen at 10:58)

Jeremy gives Lieberman huge credit for letting ten agency owners inside. From there it was Jeff Sutherland’s Scrum book, other agency owners, and a lean consultant to guide the rollout. The hardest part was letting go so the team could work at a higher level. Andrew asked where someone overwhelmed by the idea should start. Sprint cadence should evolve rather than be prescribed, Jeremy said. Then come the habits.

The process of learning to do daily stand-ups that aren’t more than a quarter of an hour long, the process of learning to do sprint planning meetings that don’t go on forever, that do come from the team, that do respond to what’s actually happening with your engagements for each client rather than just what’s prescribed out of the box because that’s what you sold as your inbound engagement.

(Listen at 14:23)

Eight months in, Jeremy expected it to be next spring or summer before they had it down pat. Clients get educated on why the process is better for them and, advisedly, invited into backlog meetings. Scrum books assume software development, so you adjust: the real work in inbound is mid-funnel, looking at what’s happening and deciding what to do more of. Story cards didn’t work for Equinet either. They point by effort in Trello, not by time, and repointing wrecks velocity.

Stop working with the wrong clients before raising prices

Andrew asked whether scrum delivery changes how Equinet prices.

As yet we’ve not put up our prices for a client because of the way we do this. However, we have stopped working with certain clients because they simply weren’t coming with us… We were working with some clients that were far more focused on the cost of things rather than the value of what was being delivered. We were working with a few clients who were simply on retainers that were too low, and they were just as much work and twice as much trouble.

(Listen at 19:53)

Just being completely candid about it, I think maybe we’ve been underpricing a little… It’s harder to sell bigger retainers, and that doesn’t mean that it’s the wrong thing to do. It just means that you’ve got to be far more disciplined in your sales processes and what constitutes a good fit for you, as well as whether we are truly a good fit for the client, which is an equally important question.

(Listen at 21:59)

Prices will go up for new clients. The ones who stayed like that the work responds to what’s actually happening rather than what someone guessed 12 months earlier, which is also why Equinet doesn’t plan activity beyond three months. Jeremy’s closing line on agencies that churn out the same program for every client: the problem with that is the word churn.