How to Build a Remote Marketing Agency Team

Ryan Malone founded SmartBug Media in 2007 after years at Deloitte & Touche, Seagate, and venture-backed companies as VP of marketing. Gray MacKenzie hosted this episode of Inbound Agency Journey (Andrew Dymski introduces it) just after SmartBug reached HubSpot Diamond partner status with 25 people and no office. Ryan walked through the employee-only model, apprentice-style training, the hiring process, and advice for agencies a year or two into HubSpot.

Everyone is an employee, and the office doesn’t exist

The remote decision came the week Ryan quit his VP job, when a friend near the end of his career got sent on a trip that could have been a phone call and missed a nephew’s birthday. Gray asked what makes a virtual team this large work. Ryan’s first answer was employment status, which at SmartBug means benefits set up in 16 states.

Everybody here is an employee. So I think one of the challenges with virtual companies is there’s this sense of temporariness, because a lot of virtual companies hire people as contractors… If you want to treat the people that you work with like they’re part of your family, you have to treat them like they’re part of your family.

(Listen at 04:56)

Staff meetings run on video and always include something unrelated to work, and once a year the whole team flies to the West Coast for SmartBug-a-palooza. Ryan’s warning for owners considering a hybrid: an office with a remote component bolted on leaves people never quite in the know. Either do it or don’t. He also pushed back on the usual reason for going remote.

I’ve talked to a lot of business owners that do virtual stuff, and most of them, it’s because they’re like, well, hey, I don’t have to spend money on office space. But that’s not really why. The reason why you go virtual is because you can hire better people.

(Listen at 15:10)

Training modeled on apprenticeship

Gray asked whether SmartBug raised money, given the overhead of employees and the top tier of HubSpot. It has been profitable from day one, never raised or borrowed, and hadn’t made a sales call in five and a half years. Ryan thinks of the agency as a system where creativity is one of the steps, and his example was training. The typical agency hires someone junior and sends them to HubSpot Academy, which teaches where the buttons are, not how to be effective.

Our training process, for example, is actually based on the apprentice model of the old industrial age stuff. So if you’re a bricklayer, the first thing that you do when you’re an apprentice is you learn how to make cement, and then you do it over and over and over until you’re good at it.

(Listen at 18:53)

New hires start with blogging in HubSpot, practice it the SmartBug way, then move onto accounts.

Every deliverable that we build has a process behind it. It’s not designed to strip out creativity. It’s designed to make sure that all the little details that are the difference between an okay campaign and a really good campaign get done every time. And that’s why I think it’s kind of translated into a really low churn rate.

(Listen at 20:09)

The agreement SmartBug makes with each hire

Asked about culture, Ryan said he tells every candidate he’s trying to build a place people stay forever, knowing that’s unlikely. He frames it as an agreement with two sides.

Our side of the agreement is that we’re going to provide you this opportunity that I just described. Your side of the agreement is that you’re going to be completely transparent about what it is that you need to be successful, what skills that you want us to help you develop, that you’re going to hit dates, and that you’re going to do what’s right for the client, even if that means that we have to spend more money on the client that month.

(Listen at 23:09)

In the company’s history, two people had left by their own choice. Everyone else stayed.

Always interviewing, no resumes, four scored interviews

Gray asked where the people come from. Referrals and job boards (never Craigslist), but the real answer is timing.

We’re always interviewing. So because we’re growing a decent clip, we don’t really wait until a job opening happens… Most of the time when it comes time to hire somebody, we’ve already got a person or two that’s been through the interview process.

(Listen at 26:10)

Applications arrive through a form into Teamwork, not as resumes, and a weak LinkedIn profile ends the conversation. Ryan takes a half-hour call first to find out why the person wants to be there; wanting to work from home, or to leave somewhere else, isn’t enough. Then four one-on-one video interviews, each scoring one theme from one to ten so candidates compare on the same dimensions, and a final interview with Ryan.

Advice for the agency a year or two into HubSpot

Gray’s last question was for the owner past the learning curve but not growing. Ryan gave three answers. Differentiate: take what’s useful from HubSpot’s training and ignore the rest, or you’re one of 500 agencies with the same language. Make customers win and stop counting an hour over scope. And the one he sees owners get wrong.

Don’t be cheap. Invest in your team, invest in infrastructure. Don’t do things that erode the trust of your company. I talked to a couple people who were contemplating installing monitoring software on their team’s computers to make sure they were at their desk, and all that stuff means that you’re gonna hire people that ultimately you don’t trust. Find good people, invest in them, help them grow their career.

(Listen at 35:37)

Gray said those were the mistakes GuavaBox made at the start, and growth only showed up once they got past them.