How to Operationalize and Create Templates at Your Agency

Suzanne Marsalisi is the director of client services at the Austin Lawrence Group, where she handles delivery, some strategy, and project management. She came up in public accounting as a CPA, moved into operations at Big Four firms, and had been at the agency about two and a half years when this was recorded. Andrew Dymski hosted this episode of Agency Journey. The conversation is about bringing process to a team of creatives and, increasingly, to clients who ask for it.

She asks “how do we operationalize this?” in every meeting

Andrew asked how an operations background shows up in day-to-day client work. Suzanne said it’s a reflex.

Any time I’m in a meeting with a client or internally here with my team, regardless of what we’re talking about, I’m already thinking, okay, how do we operationalize this?

(Listen at 03:51)

Her example was a client who wanted to connect marketing automation to SurveyMonkey. While they asked about emailing people based on their answers, she was already working out whether to build an API or use what exists. The habit matters most the first time the agency does something new.

I like to make sure when we’re doing something for that first time, we’re really stepping back and thinking about process and structure before we dive into the tactical aspect of it. Because if we don’t have a framework for the project management and how we’re operationalizing it, chances are you’re gonna run off the rails. You’re going to at best maybe have some inefficiencies, and at worst find yourself in a situation where you’re missing a deadline or you’re under-delivering.

(Listen at 05:05)

Templates start as someone else’s client deliverable

Andrew asked whether Suzanne builds everything herself or the whole team contributes. She and one senior strategist do most of the templatizing, and the raw material usually comes from work already done for a client.

Often someone will create something for a specific use case, and then I’ll recognize that it would be good to templatize either that document or that item or the process around how it came about. And so I’ll take what someone made as a client deliverable, for example, and scrub it and make it a template version that then lives in our shared drive.

(Listen at 12:35)

Templates go stale, and a new hire is what exposes it

Andrew asked how she keeps templates current. She was honest that there’s no process for that part. Refreshes happen ad hoc, when she notices something’s off or when someone new can’t follow the old version.

We had a templated approach to how we would run a webinar for a client, and we did it for probably a year and a half and it morphed a little bit, and then also the software system we were using changed a bit as well. So that templated process no longer made sense. Now we were able to work, we all knew that, that was institutional knowledge, so we never updated the spreadsheet. And then we had an intern that came along and I tried to set him up on something, and he was like, wait, I don’t understand this.

(Listen at 10:46)

Her fix is a quarterly goal of two to three new templatized processes, which includes refreshing ones where the software or the best practice has changed.

Creatives get to brainstorm, then she draws a line

Andrew raised the usual tension: creatives who feel process kills ideas. Suzanne said the team hired her on purpose for structure and still pushed back when a brainstorm didn’t want her document or her structured meeting.

In the same way they had to learn to deal with me implementing structure, I’ve had to learn not all black and white, there has to be shades of gray.

(Listen at 14:27)

Even the free-form sessions get a light structure: she captures what’s said and spins it back out into something usable. And she decides when the free-for-all has run long enough.

I feel comfortable, if we’ve gone too far, we’ve done it for a while, to step in and say, okay, drawing a line in the sand. It’s time to now take that next step, and we’ve got all this creative stuff. What are we doing with it?

(Listen at 15:43)

Clients are asking to be managed

Andrew asked whether the process stays inside the agency. Suzanne said it has to reach the client, and more and more the clients are the ones asking for it.

We have found more and more that clients have actively come to us and said, I need process, I need structure, because we have so many clients that are just stretched very thin. They have limited bandwidth. So they want someone to put a fence around what they need to do and make it very simple and very easy for them to make requests.

(Listen at 16:21)

The agency sets meeting cadences and communication expectations during onboarding. For one events client that used to send requests by email, they wrote a client-specific briefing document with deadlines built in. During a big push, clients get a morning email with the day’s focus and the week’s focus. The reaction over the prior six months surprised her.

I don’t know if it’s a trend in the market or what, but we’ve had so many people have said, I like that you emailed to remind me about this every Tuesday morning. Please do it again. Keep doing this.

(Listen at 18:53)

Senior people at client organizations are asking to be babysat, in her words, and thanking her for it. Her standard: a client should never have to chase the agency for a strategy brief or a status update.