My First 8 Weeks Diving Back Into Agencyland

So I'm now into my eighth week with MRM//McCann Hong Kong and it's been absolutely smooth and perfect sailing thus far. Waltzing into the office at 1045am, clocking off at 530pm, customers love me, money falls from the sky like rain, and zero departures.

Yah right. :)

While it hasn't been quite as rosy as outlined above, it's also not been smooth sailing by any stretch of the imagination. And yet, I am more excited today than the day I joined and I feel things are just getting started. Since joining, I've flown to NY once and SG twice for key global pitches, understood and chewed over our agency's unique and exciting value proposition, met everyone in the HK office and a bunch of people in the network, dove head-first into financials, begun thinking about annual planning AND discovered how to connect my phone to the office wifi (very important).

In this post, I will share a little bit of the journey up to now. If I had to guess, I would think the people most interested in this article would be:

• Other managers stepping into a similar situation
• Those interested in learning a bit about MRM//McCann
• My mother (Hi Mom - love you!)

The Only Constant is....Change

So the business I now oversee is a significant one with roughly >60 talented staff in HK (3,000 globally) sizable engagements with F100 customers around the world, and direct oversight from HQ in NY. We are part of IPG that boasts nearly 50,000 practice specialists across marketing, communications and data. And even though I have spent a lot of my professional career involved in digital marketing and data, many of the projects and offerings we offer are of another level of complexity that is both exciting but also takes time to fully master.

However, I was confident I would be able to find a way to swim and eventually kick butt and take names. Naturally, I had a very specific plan for what I wanted to do in my first week, month and quarter. And that of course went out the window pretty much the first week.

As famed boxer, philosopher and poet Mike Tyson so aptly observed, "Everyone has a plan 'til they get punched in the mouth."

Thankfully, that doesn't perfectly describe agency life as there's not much punching of mouths (or any other body part) happening - I haven't been to those meetings yet. But certainly agency life is notorious for being ever-evolving and thus the best laid plans can quickly evaporate. I think it has something in the water they put in our coffee machines that the big bosses drink. So without giving away too much detail that might get me into trouble with IPG Legal, let's just say that in my first week, the team situation as well as my planned prioritization got punched in the mouth.

Having been fortunate enough to have worked on amazing teams that executed against targets that were constantly moving, I've gotten a little bit smarter about the right (and wrong ways) to react when things get fuzzy. It's crucial that I turn off the part of my brain that might be resistant to change or craving how things were, and activate the part that gets excited about succeeding in spite of the waves. This allows the possibility to continue on the path with the same velocity and enthusiasm, even when the path has changed sometimes dramatically. So with that, I share below the journey I've been on thus far.

• Start getting to know your managers. You will no doubt lean on them heavily in the role so this is absolutely essential. Strong, transparent and flexible relationships will only help you on the journey. Depending on the situation, change may even be required at some point. Quickly building relationships that allow you to understand where your managers stand, their back-stories, their strengths and weaknesses will inform how best you can help them and they support you. I feel so fortunate to have inherited a truly engaged and dedicated management team which only raises the bar for me to be the best manager and partner possible.
• Understand the financials. Not all revenue streams and account teams are the same, get to know how your agency actually makes money, and which revenue is more sustainable than others. Your colleagues working in Finance will be critical in this journey. Don't be shy, ask all the questions you can about the different internal KPIs they use to assess the financials of the business. Depending on your P&L experience coming into the role, spending up to half a day per week engaged in the financials would be time well spent for your first quarter.
• Take initiative to help the broader team to know you. As the new kid on the block and in a visible leadership role, naturally people will be curious about your background, thinking, personality etc. Help the broader agency team to get to know and ideally like and respect you, though that will more likely come with actions. I took a page out of the playbook of one of our US' lead leadership who held coffee catchups with all of her 300 staff in groups of 10 when she joined.
• Meet your clients. This is an obvious one and likely will come naturally to you if you have been hired into a role to be the face of the company. Necessarily, you will want to prioritize meeting the most important/challenged clients first. While you will likely want to know as much as possible about your client's business before feeling ready to speak with them, I tend to believe that the sooner you engage with your clients in dialogue, the sooner you can start asking all the questions you would like. I'm still making progress against this but expect to complete this effort in coming weeks.
• Make the Pitch Your Own. We are fundamentally a digital agency but we have a very unique positioning and talents, both because of the customers we service and the team capabilities we have. For example, we service one of the largest media companies in the world, and roughly a quarter of our team are technical in nature (Programmers, Developers, Data Scientists), giving us a unique perspective and opportunity to i.) track in real-time what's happening with the client's business at every stage where data can be collected, ii.) build/deliver experiences that optimize these metrics. But as any sales professional will tell you, tailoring the pitch to your own personality is crucial for it to be effective. Practicing making the pitch your own by explaining what you do to friends and family is a great place to start followed by other colleagues, and from there other prospects.

(Wait for it...2:30. Classic scene from one of the best sales movies in the galaxy Tommy Boy)

• Understand the existing processes. How does the agency track and deliver work on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis? What do the teams do proactively vs. reactively and what is the backstory for why these processes exist? It's important to understand how the agency has been operating and the logic and objective behind each one.
• Initiate new ones. It's highly likely that that as you start probing into why the agency does some of the things it does, the answer is very often, "This is how it's always been." As you dig deeper and ask questions about whether the desired outcomes are best achieved with the current process, you are likely to realize that there are numerous opportunities to improve existing processes or even initiate new ones altogether. If approached with a degree of humility and a focus on outcomes, you will very often be supported as you start instituting/overhauling processes. The true sniff test in my view is whether the modified processes help you or the team execute more effectively.
• Get on with it and cast aside your doubts. I was hired into the role for a reason. And while it's completely normal and expected to have some self-doubt, the great news is that I'm so busy getting into the guts of the business that it's consumed all my mental capacity that there is literally no room (or time) left for doubts during the day. And in the small occasions when doubts crop into my head, I only need to recall the journey that has brought me here, the brave and innovative work we have done in the past, the switched on clients we are lucky enough to serve, the ever-evolving tech and data landscape, teammate growth opportunities, and the new global network of MRM (not to mention IPG) colleagues I get to work with, and there's literally no more room in my head left for doubts.
• Take time for your and your family. It's a marathon not a sprint. No star performer does it alone or on the drop of a dime. Your high performance can probably boil down to several fundamental inputs that all lead to you being you. Our egos would all love to take full credit with how amazing and incredible we are, but in actuality environmental factors have a tremendous role in unlocking and enabling us to do what we do. This means that your leadership role REQUIRES you to maximize your overall performance, which means taking care of yourself.

Overall Performance = Talent * Passion * Sustainability * Time

• Be Grateful. No matter what's happening on a day to day basis, appreciate the position you are in and the fact that any problems you are dealing with in the end don't matter all that much. Turn all pride or self-congratulatory energy into effort thinking about how best to pay it forward and keep your head from over-inflating. We are all just specs of dust in the end.