why we're not an agency anymore

MADE 77: Don't Hate the Players, Hate the Game, and the Future of Creative Destruction

You separate yourself from the field by being able to answer three key questions and then standing firm in the venn diagram they create:

What do we believe that others don’t believe?

What do we know that others don’t know?

What can we do that others can’t or won’t do?

Laser focus on these three answers will keep your business in the zone of genius and serving clients you love doing work that you are uniquely empowered to do. Staying true to these things will be the hardest thing you do as a leader.

Your success and your customers and committed to getting you to stop. The ability to make money on secondary things and to scratch where your clients itch is the bane of business, and it must be eradicated with a passion. And it nearly killed CultureCraft.

What I Believed, Knew, Did

• I believed in the culturemaking power of the creative arts to “market” inside and out and set a business onto its own flywheel and off the hamsterwheel of marketing tactics.
• I knew how to integrate tech, brand, training, and marketing to power creative breakthrough. It was what I had done in in my corporate life, and it was what I was doing in multiple consulting relationships.?
• I had the ability to translate creative and strategy into languages and tools that moved corporate strategy and were comprehendible in the C-suite. And I could do it in places that had resisted change in the past.

Because these things were like breathing to me, I didn’t see them as particularly special or foundational. (A huge strategic error.) So when clients started needing other things as a part of the strategy work we were doing: websites, social media, ad strategies, blogs, sales materials… I hired good people to produce those things.?

In short, CultureCraft became a marketing agency.

There are many structural problems with the marketing agency world that are harming both clients and marketers. They keep companies spending money and agencies spinning up services with ever-diminishing returns.

The System of Delusion about Marketing

I became a CMO on accident. I was the “creative guy” in the company that needed somebody to own the website, then own the content creation, then own the email planning, then own the rebrand… and so it went. Simultaneously I was overseeing tech, half of operations, sales training, and various growth initiatives.

I didn’t see myself as primarily a marketer. And I still don’t.?

My primary work has always been creative destruction and lean strategy. (More that in a sec.) Because marketing had been one of my favorite tools do that work, I assumed doing marketing for our clients would accelerate the transformational benefits we could provide.

I was wrong.

There is a system of delusion about marketing fed to growth stage organizations.

Lies people believe about marketing:

• Marketing is a commodity that should be as automated and cheap as possible.?This is a tactical error, but so prevalent and so supported by the Marketing Industrial Complex that it’s very hard to dislodge. I could have retired multiple times over on the money prospective clients have spent trying to do marketing “cheap.”
• Marketing is a collection of tactics that you’ve “heard work” and just need to try.?If you buy this, I have a bridge in the mid-Atlantic for sale. The “just do x-tactic (insert social, blogs, ads, webinars)” is the most expensive way to market your business and its not even close.
• Marketing is about getting leads.?Almost no one knows what constitutes a lead. Organizations would rather spend $100,000 defining what a lead is than build their go-to-market to thrive in the modern world.

I didn’t realize how prevalent these lies were until I ran an agency. And they mask a fundamental truth:

Marketing is your most interdisciplinary department (when run well), and essential to Culture, Growth, and Brand Value. All things that make you a lot of money, but also make doing what you do enjoyable.?

To maximize marketing's effects, it must be culturally embedded across the organization. Billions of dollars are spent every year to avoid doing this work.

Organizations build resistance over time. Sacred cows. False beliefs. Cultural silos. Founder religion. These things create rigid growth ceilings that I know from experience marketing is key tool for breaking through.

But agencies aren't built to do that work.

Agencies can bring creative assets and tools that may be useful. But what organizations really need is the structure and the steady hand of how to break resistance.?

This gets us back to my two favorite things: Lean Strategy and Creative Destruction.

Lean Strategy and Creative Destruction

When your org hits a ceiling, it won’t know it for a while. You’ll be surrounded by external factors—the economy, the loss of a big client, personnel shifts—which hide the fact that systemically your growth is about to plateau. More than half of the organizations reading this right now are either in or on their way to cyclical decline. You just don’t know it yet.

Because the problem is systemic, the solution has to be systemic too. But you can’t come in like a wrecking ball. Or drop in some alien website or marketing material that no one on the inside knows how to leverage strategically.

Growth resistanceand the cultural norms that enable it aren't purely operational. It’s not budgets or operations or even leadership dynamics. (Though it can be found in all of these.)

Growth resistance is cultural: a set of assumptions that once produced growth but now undermine it. And more dangerous, it is embedded in stuff that leaders throughout the company value, esteem, and find their worth in every day.

No one (other than strategists) want a big strategy. Leaders want solutions. The meme factory on 25-page strategic plans has made the case that I don’t need to: the MBA-grade, complex "strategic plan" to solve big problems cannot move at the speed of business. It’s archaic, fat, and ill-suited for human problems.

Lean strategy is a tool for unraveling the layers of a problem and isolating their source. It reveals competing motives, human bias, and calcified resistance.?

Because marketing is the sin-eater of most organizations, it is a great place to start with lean strategy. Because as you peel back the layers of "why does our marketing suck?" (a common question that people come to us with) you find the source roots of that suckage have very little to do with marketing.

The goal is to change the most things with the least impact. To do that, you need creative desctruction.

Think of all those sacred cows, those tired beliefs, those Founder biases that are lurking around your organization. We can’t take them all to the butcher shop and let them bleed out on the packing room floor. Your organization would have nothing holding it together.?

But we do need to break things strategically: A marketing tactic. A sales methodology. The onboarding process for acquisitions. The way the Founder approves content. What sales is allowed to say.

Each of these things will need creative solutions as both interim and full-scale replacements. Leaders will need to be engaged and inspired that a better way is possible. We will need to break without breakage, all while building bridges to a future state of growth.

That’s creative destruction. It removes just enough to let the light in so we can see where problems are rooted. And then allows us to both add and subtract at the same time. Working fast and slow.

Agencies don’t do that.

In fact, they are operationally built to avoid doing that. Creating a firewall of responsibility between the agency and the client so that they aren’t held responsible for things outside their control. It makes sense from a business design standpoint. But it simply cannot solve the real issues that keep orgs from healthy growth.

It’s why CultureCraft is no longer an agency. We no longer provide those marketng services. We do take trust and use it to make growth using the systems and tools described above. I had to do my own creative destruction, months of lean strategy peeling back the layers of why I created CC in the first place.

I had to rediscover my Believe, Know, Do.

Building internal trust to move quickly AND build systemically to unlock growth is the only way new growth cultures get made. I know this from doing it over and over again.?

Agencies love to do the sparkly rainbow alien landing. Dropping something in your world that shocks and awes and feels like revolution. But the shiny objects are a payoff for the cultural work that makes them work. Orgs like yours are wooed into a sense of fantasy that these big content strategies, brand designs, new websites, "proven" ad strategies will unlock something.?

They can’t. They aren’t built to.

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