Team Building, Retention and Employee Poaching with Remington Begg

Remington Begg started Impulse Creative in 2007 (as Remington Graphics) and had a team of eight when this was recorded in early 2016. Gray MacKenzie hosted the interview, episode 56 of Inbound Agency Journey; Andrew Dymski opens the show and joins the recap. The poaching discussion that gives the episode its title is one stretch of a wider conversation: how Impulse picks clients, its best client win, the weekly meeting where the team rebuilds its SOPs, and what losing two people in two months did to the agency.

Impulse picks clients by mindset

Gray asked which vertical Impulse focuses on. Remington said the clients that work out are the ones focused on data-driven, organic growth, whatever the industry. The ones that failed looked great on paper and wanted a vendor rather than a partner. Impulse’s habit of questioning every request is the filter.

You get a lot of whys from the people in our team. Sometimes that annoys people, and that’s great, because if it annoys them in the beginning, we ask why and we want to fully understand, it’s usually a good indicator that the client’s not gonna be able to fit right.

(Listen at 07:56)

A window contractor who wanted a brochure site and got a 50% close rate

Gray asked for one client win. Remington picked a Florida contractor that sells impact windows, doors, and hurricane shutters. The owner came in about three years earlier wanting an online brochure and said blogging was a waste of his time. Eighteen months in, lead flow was growing 20 to 30 percent month over month with no paid ads.

Organic traffic in the very beginning when we started with him, I think, was less than 10% of the traffic coming to his website, and now is close to 80% of the traffic, and obviously the leads too.

(Listen at 09:51)

Then Impulse put the client’s sales staff on the HubSpot CRM and got the whole picture from lead to customer.

He’s converting over 50% of the leads that come in into customers, because we dialed this in over this past three years to a point where there’s a 50% chance he’s gonna have a customer on the phone if he picks up the phone with the leads that come through the website.

(Listen at 10:28)

When Remington asked for a raise, the owner laughed, said he couldn’t handle any more work, and instead asked Impulse to do the same thing for a related business he was starting. Remington called it a blank check.

A weekly standing meeting for rebuilding SOPs

Asked for a process worth sharing, Remington offered the process for creating SOPs. Turnover had made him want to understand the road to profitability with each employee, which starts with knowing what each job takes. Impulse keeps a wall at the office for it. The rule: anything with more than three steps gets written on the wall so the team can dig in and optimize it together. His example was client onboarding. Impulse had been treating every client like an inbound retainer, including the website design clients.

We itemized the inbound process, and then we said, okay, so which ones of these don’t apply for a website redesign? And from a time tracking perspective, we just ran through one with the team, and it cut almost 30% of our time out.

(Listen at 16:35)

The meeting is its own half-hour slot once a week, held in the bullpen with everyone standing at their desks. Each person brings a procedure, puts it on the screen, and the group refines it live in the document. Finished procedures live in Confluence, the Impulse wiki, where anyone can update one without approval.

Two key employees poached in two months

Gray raised poaching, which kept coming up on inbound.org and in his conversations with owners. When someone from another agency approaches Remington, he asks why they’re leaving and whether they’ve talked to their supervisor, because their owner may still be able to fix it. On being poached, he didn’t buy the argument he kept hearing.

The market is getting competitive and the pool is very thin. And I’ve talked to various agency owners and they’re like, Remington, good talent is never gonna be looking for a job. You got to take it. And I get that, but at the same time, it’s wrong.

(Listen at 23:03)

It had happened to him in person: an owner he’d shaken hands with at a HubSpot partner day telling him he’d just taken a key employee because he had the funds to pay double. Impulse, he’d learned, was good at training marketers and had to get better at keeping them.

We had two key employees, for lack of a better word, poached within about two months of each other. And for a small team of eight, that can be a pretty big blow to culture.

(Listen at 24:50)

When Impulse polled the staff, health coverage was the big ask, so the agency added full health benefits along with unlimited vacation (real unlimited vacation, as long as the work gets done). Each replacement hire turned out to be a better iteration of the role, and the turnover is what pushed the SOP work.

Turnover is what ate the profit

Beyond retention, Remington’s 2016 focus was profitability, and the two are connected.

One of the biggest reasons for our lack of profitability this past year has been really focused around the turnover rate of the staff, because you can only be so profitable when your staff is learning at the same time they’re doing.

(Listen at 28:00)

The rest of the interview covers the tools Impulse runs on (Jira, Confluence, a stripped-down agile with sprints and burndown charts, a recorded UberConference line for client calls) and Remington’s 5:30 a.m. routine. The recap with Andrew widens it to how the inbound agency community attracts and keeps talent as demand grows.