Crafting Agency Core Values and an Organizational Chart

This episode has no outside guest. Gray MacKenzie and Andrew Dymski, then partners at DoInbound and GuavaBox, recorded it as step two of their agency framework series: last week was vision, this week is the team that gets you there. Core values come first, then the org chart, with GuavaBox’s departments and DoInbound’s hiring math as the examples.

Define the values before you hire

Andrew set the order of operations: values first, then the chart, then the people.

We want to define first the core values that are going to be kind of the heartbeat of that team, so that when you interview people, you’re not just looking at the skill sets that they have, but you’re looking at the characteristics that they hold… before you get in and hire people and let the culture dictate itself.

(Listen at 01:15)

Gray had just interviewed an agency owner whose team found their values by spending 90 minutes telling stories about big moments in the agency’s history. It raised a question.

We kind of had this conversation about, should core values be aspirational or reality driven? Like, are they where you are now or where you want to be? And I really think it needs to be a mix, probably leaning a little bit more towards where we are today. If people can’t relate to it at all where you are currently, how impactful is that going to be?

(Listen at 03:05)

Make it a group effort, and stop at three to seven

Andrew’s first rule was that the owner shouldn’t write the values alone and announce them. If the team isn’t sharing ownership of them, he asked, why should they live up to them? “It needs to be more than just a poster on the office wall or something that sits in a Google Drive file somewhere.” He shared DoInbound’s five (fulfillment, integrity, helpfulness, ownership and positivity) and capped the list.

Make it a group effort and just kind of try to drill down to, you know, five to seven, three to seven, like that range. Don’t try to go after 15 or 20 different things here, because that’s not going to be worth it.

(Listen at 07:52)

“Close enough” isn’t a hiring standard

Gray paused Andrew’s org chart question to deal with an objection he’d had himself: we’re a small team, we all basically agree, why spend the time writing it down?

I think that without them defined, it would be easy to look at somebody and say, yeah, this person is generally a fit. If we had it defined, they might only hit three or four of those core values. But we’re forgetful. As long as someone’s like close enough, especially in the agency space, you’re probably like, yeah, that’s fine. Versus having, hey, does this person represent what we stand for and what we’re all about on all five of these characteristics?

(Listen at 12:17)

His example: a candidate who has the first four but is missing positivity, and is a drag to work with, becomes a sore spot for the whole organization.

The org chart is aspirational, and GuavaBox’s version of it

Where values lean toward the present, Gray said the chart should describe the agency you’re trying to build.

The org chart, more than core values, probably is aspirational. Where are we trying to go with this organization?… If you start out and you’re wearing 15 hats, and each year you reduce that number by two or five or one, you can see how you’re making progress towards an end goal.

(Listen at 13:37)

Andrew added that the chart lowers his stress: the undefined post-it notes in his head become a list he can prioritize. His caution: hand off ownership of a role once there’s a documented process, without micromanaging whoever takes it.

Gray said he’s torn about sharing GuavaBox’s chart because they didn’t do it perfectly, but a real example beats a blank page. GuavaBox landed on three departments.

We’ve got growth, which is your marketing and sales. You’ve got success, which is client delivery and everything that goes in there. And you’ve got operations, which is the legal and finance and internal people and culture part of things. You can break it up a lot of different ways.

(Listen at 18:04)

The first things they outsourced were graphic design, copywriting and SEO, which the founders had been doing themselves (“We were actually writing client content back in 2011, 2012. That was horrible.”). Later came sales and marketing help, a director of inbound partnerships, and bookkeeping and accounting.

Do the hiring math, then recruit early

To decide what to hand off next, they used the three lists from Chris Ducker’s Virtual Freedom (what you don’t want to do, shouldn’t be doing, and enjoy doing). Then the chart becomes a hiring plan with numbers on it.

Roughly, to hire this position, that’s going to be a $60,000 investment, maybe $70,000, $80,000 fully loaded if I bring in an employee. Now I know I need to add five, six, seven thousand dollars a month in revenue to be allowed to add this person… Now we can plot this out and say, okay, if these are revenue points, here’s where I anticipate bringing this person on.

(Listen at 23:02)

Andrew said to redo the exercise every six months, since a growing team changes your problems rather than removing them. Gray’s example from DoInbound: after investing heavily in the product team through 2016, the next seat was a marketing director. Knowing the revenue point let them recruit ahead of need instead of hiring in a rush when the need arrived, which Gray said they’d done before. Andrew: “We’ve learned the hard way from that. Got burned.”