Inbound Agency Operating System with Marisa Smith

Marisa Smith started The Whole Brain Group in Ann Arbor as a solo contractor in 2002. By the time of this 2015 conversation she ran a 13-person agency doing 75 to 80 percent of its work on inbound retainers. Andrew Dymski hosted this episode of Inbound Agency Journey, and Gray MacKenzie joined him for the recap at the end. The conversation is about how Marisa adopted EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, for her own team and then for her clients.

Growing past the Panera table

Marisa left a programming job at the University of Michigan expecting more flexibility and got the opposite. The agency pivoted to WordPress development in 2008 and found HubSpot in 2012. Andrew asked what it looked like to go from a few people to a real team.

At the beginning, world headquarters was Panera, right? So we were just basically holding our company meetings at the same table every week… So the biggest transition we had to really make as we started to get larger was to get much clearer about roles and responsibilities and who was accountable for what. And I realized that I couldn’t know everything about everything anymore.

(Listen at 05:28)

The way out was EOS, adopted in 2012 from Gino Wickman’s book Traction, and it took two to three years to get everyone through it. Marisa said her team would tell you she didn’t let go well at first. Trust in the plan changed that.

Once I really trusted that everybody was on the same page with the vision and the plan, it was a lot easier to let go, because I could trust that they were going to make the same decisions that I would make, because they had all the information that I had.

(Listen at 11:13)

The team bought in once issues started getting solved

Andrew asked how she got the team to buy in. Marisa made everybody read the book and ran the tools, and the turn came when people watched issues get named, solved, assigned and knocked off the list.

It’s really like changing our culture from discussing the heck out of everything to actually solving things and assigning responsibility and then actually doing what we said we were going to do instead of getting distracted.

(Listen at 08:52)

Her own hardest part was focus. As a visionary type she’d try to solve 15 issues and half solve three, so the fix was three priorities a quarter, finished. The team rallied against the structure at first, having left a big university partly to escape process and meetings. Her verdict now is that the right structure freed everyone up.

A 90-minute Tuesday meeting and a 15-number scorecard

Her leadership team (Marisa plus the directors of sales and marketing and of client services) meets for 90 minutes every Tuesday morning on the EOS Level 10 agenda: a quick check-in, the scorecard, last week’s to-dos, the quarterly rocks, then the top three issues. At the end they rate the meeting from one to ten.

The thing we like about it is just that it stops a lot of those little one-off discussions that can happen during the week and turn into a two hour thing. We just go, hey, this is great, let’s discuss it on Tuesday, put it on the issues list.

(Listen at 14:54)

Andrew asked what’s actually on the scorecard.

Right now the scorecard is, I think, about 15 key numbers… Marketing traffic, leads, contacts added to the database, what’s our pipeline look like, what are the closed opportunities that we’ve closed this month… We track things like first response time on tickets that are put through our help desk system, how many tickets are in the backlog.

(Listen at 16:07)

She treats them as leading indicators: a lead count that should be at 100 and sits at 10 becomes an issue that week, ahead of softer items like someone feeling overwhelmed.

Clients run on a light version of the same system

The system worked well enough internally that the team started wishing clients ran the same way.

This whole system worked so well for us as a company that we started to get annoyed when we were working with clients, going, God, if we just had them following a scorecard, or jeez, if we just had a two page business plan from them, our lives would be a lot easier. So we actually adapted the way we run our retainer projects to use kind of a light version of this.

(Listen at 17:56)

Each client agrees on quarterly rocks, gets a scorecard tied to them, keeps an issues list between meetings, runs the monthly meeting on a Level 10 agenda and plans quarterly. New clients get it eased in (she compared it to sneaking vegetables into a meal) and the book goes in the welcome basket. The structure sells, and it does one more thing.

It helps us say no to things too. Clients can sometimes come in and say, oh, we want to do this now. And you go, okay, wait a second. We already agreed that our priorities were these three things. What are we going to do with this fourth thing you just introduced?

(Listen at 20:25)

Her proof is a three-year client, an $8 million company with lots of small deals when they started. Her strategist now meets its director of sales weekly to pick rocks together. Deal size is up 30 to 40 percent, revenue has doubled, and the client hasn’t added an inside salesperson.

The rest of the episode covers her tools (Teamwork, Google Docs and Less Meeting), hiring ahead of revenue, and why “we have our act together” is now her recruiting pitch too.