By We recently hosted our first in-person SparkTogether event. It was a smashing success without any mishaps. I got a ton of compliments on the execution, but I got too much credit. It’s really all thanks to CKE, our event planning agency. Charlene and her team delivered on an unforgettable couple of days, and we only had two meetings leading up to the event.
Having few meetings is just how we do things at SparkToro, and managing our agencies and consultants is no different. Rand, Casey, and I are good at email and we’re good at working asynchronously, so a key quality we look for in agencies and consultants is that they don’t need much hand-holding. It’s all really just symptomatic of our approach to chill work, where we lead with trust and boundaries, and focus on outcomes over input.
I realize not every company is able to pull this off. Maybe it’s your company culture or maybe it’s the nature of a given project that requires high-touch relationships with external partners. Either way, it might help to try to set yourself up for a more asynchronous partnership. After all, everybody wants more time back on their calendar.
Here’s the chill way we hire and manage agencies and consultants at SparkToro.
We SMART-ly assess our needs first.
Maybe it’s symptomatic of being such a lean team, but we’re really careful with how we spend money. We’ll only hire people if we really need the help. And by “really needing the help,” I mean we scope out the estimated tactics and time needed for a given project, usually going as far as to draft a job description, and then we hire someone.
Depending on the role or project you’re looking to hire a consultant for, it might be a good idea to consider writing a job description. When we hired Brendan Hufford last year to fill in for me while I was out on maternity leave, I wrote a full-page job description that included a list of tasks. It helped me organize my thoughts, and it helped all of us stay aligned on what we needed to get done in my absence.
If you’re hiring an agency, you might not need a job description. Instead, it might be helpful to write out some specific goals. If there’s one great takeaway I learned from corporate life (and yeah, I’m pretty sure there’s only one great takeaway) it’s SMART goals: specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, and time-bound. Sticking to that criteria will help you write these out. And writing these out will help ensure your team and that external stakeholder stay aligned on what needs to get done.
I often like to think of this as, “What job will this goal do for me?” This helps me to home in on a handful of agencies or consultants and suss out whether my expectations are reasonable. For instance, in the case of hiring an SEO agency, it’s hard to figure out a short list of agencies to consider. So I’d first ask myself what SEO job needs to be done, and then figure out the short list of agencies that could potentially support that. I talked in greater detail about all this with Katie Hollar, VP Marketing at Clutch.co. Check out the episode and writeup:
Sidenote: Clutch.co helps you find the right type of agency for your business needs, so if you don’t have that short list in mind, they’re a great starting place
We hire our friends but only if we all agree.
Let’s be honest: everyone hires their friends. What’s key is knowing when to hire your friends (vs. someone else) and creating a space for your team to speak up if they disagree. At SparkToro, I know I can always raise my hand and veto if I don’t want to hire one of Rand’s friends — and I know he won’t hold it against me. Same time, if Rand and Casey veto someone I want to hire, I know they wouldn’t do so unless they had a good reason. We all trust each other here, and that trust informs all of our dynamics and decisions.
If you or your boss are in the similar habit of tending to hire your friends or friendlies, first consider whether your team — especially your direct reports — is truly in a position to be able to say no or disagree with your choice. You can even set some guardrails for this so that you can go beyond a vague, “If you disagree, let me know!” Try this:
- Tell your team it’s a safe space for them to disagree. You have to mean it.
- Give them a few options for how to communicate this disagreement — if they’re not comfortable raising their hand in a team meeting, tell them they can email you or put it on the agenda in your next 1:1.
- Ask for reasonable specificity and/or alternatives. It’s fair to be put off by vague feedback that poses no solution, like, “They were weird, let’s keep looking.” Try asking your team to be prepared to disagree with details or with other potential solutions. “I’m not comfortable with <TBD consultant> because they refused to look me in the eye and they didn’t answer my questions during that interview process, so I would like to consider <Alternative B> or <Alternative C>,” or “Their portfolio features all customers that have no similarities to us in terms of addressable market and industry, and I’m concerned they won’t know how to work with our offering,” are valid and professional concerns.
We communicate the vision then get out of the weeds.
Often, when we have a need, we have the clear end goal or vision in mind, but we don’t often know each minute tactic to accomplish that. When we engaged Demand Maven for growth marketing and Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) work, we knew Asia Orangio would dig into customer data, conduct interviews, and collate insights. But we didn’t need to see how she would reach out to people, and we certainly didn’t need to pre-approve the questions she would ask. We knew the gaps in our work and were keenly aware of the bandwidth we didn’t have, so we asked for her help and we got out of the way.
Now for SparkTogether, this was also pretty similar when we hired Charlene Ditch and her team at CKE. SparkTogether had a clear differentiator (it’s a storytelling conference, which means, new and untold stories only!), and we knew who we wanted to speak. What we didn’t know was where to host the event, where to host the pre- and after- parties, and really, all the logistics. For her part, Charlene knows us as people, she deeply understands our brand and our event. It’s this knowledge and savvy that enabled Charlene to make at least some decisions without us (like the seemingly-small detail of stocking the conference bathrooms with toiletries and hygiene products!).
What’s tricky here is knowing whether you can trust an agency or consultant well enough to be able to do this. That brings me to my next point…
Our trust is yours to lose, not to earn.
I hate confrontation. It’s not because I’m a wuss; it’s because we’re all adults and I shouldn’t have to confront you. (Honestly, it’s also because I work full-time, do occasional consulting work, and I run a household for a family of four, so I just don’t have time or willingness to parent my professional collaborators too.)
I’ll do my due diligence upfront so that I’ll know I can trust you. If we’re not already friends whose work I know well, I’ll look through your portfolio and ask detailed questions about one of your projects. I’ll ask for references and then I’ll actually check them. Here are some questions I’ll probably ask before I hire you:
- Tell me about this project. How did you or your client come up with this idea?
- What I’m looking for: Honesty and willingness to give credit where it’s due.
- It sounds like there were a lot of moving parts. How did you stay organized and on task?
- What I’m looking for: Transparency and attention to detail.
- Can you describe your ideal client relationship?
- What I’m looking for: Empathy and willingness to advocate for their own needs
And when I check your references, I’ll probably ask:
- Why did you choose this agency/consultant over someone else?
- What I’m looking for: Their differentiator, as told by someone else.
- Looking back, do you think you could have done the job on your own (without them)?
- What I’m looking for: Their strengths and ability to deliver what they say they’ll do.
- What’s your advice to me in managing them?
- What I’m looking for: Areas of opportunity for the agency/consultant, and guidance on how to stay on top of them.
But like I said, I hate confrontation. Once you’re in, you’re in. It took me a long time to learn that it’s more advantageous to assume competence and positive intent and possibly be proven wrong, than to assume someone needs extra hand-holding and surreptitiously early deadlines to account for mishaps and be (sadly) proven right. When you assume competence, you’ll very likely have a go-getter who will get more done because they’re not hindered by your needing to approve every minor decision.
Seriously, we’re really good at email.
…and when we do need to approve those decisions, we often prefer to handle it over email at SparkToro. We all tend to use our inboxes as to-do lists, and often, the decisions we’re being asked to make involve needing to process something visual (whether it’s an article, wire frames, or a floorplan of an event space). For SparkTogether planning, everything was visual. And so Hillary Robinson at CKE would add the necessary photos/imagery to a live document she kept in Google Slides so that we could easily make decisions. Plus, Charlene herself has said it best: “Email beats memory! You can always refer back to it… not so much to what someone might have said in Zoom (unless it’s recorded).”
We’re all remote workers, sometimes on different time zones, so we’ve realized it’s often more “expensive” (as in, time- and energy- intensive) to coordinate a time that works and dial in for a standing meeting than to simply review emails and try to reply within 24-48 hours.
There’s a lot of trust (and love) at SparkToro, and this might be one of the most unique things about our company culture. But when you set a high bar for who you decide to work with, it makes everything else so much easier.