{"id":9322,"date":"2024-10-30T14:52:39","date_gmt":"2024-10-30T21:52:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sparktoro.com\/blog\/?p=9322"},"modified":"2024-10-31T12:18:10","modified_gmt":"2024-10-31T19:18:10","slug":"the-chill-work-guide-to-hiring-and-managing-agencies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sparktoro.com\/blog\/the-chill-work-guide-to-hiring-and-managing-agencies\/","title":{"rendered":"The Chill Work Guide to Hiring and Managing Agencies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We recently hosted our first in-person SparkTogether event<\/a>. It was a smashing success without any mishaps. I got a ton of compliments on the execution, but I got too much credit. It\u2019s really all thanks to CKE<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rand and Amanda onstage at SparkTogether 2024 at the end of the day. (Photo by Orhun Uygur I www.turkphotos.com)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019re good at working asynchronously, so a key quality we look for in agencies and consultants is that they don\u2019t need much hand-holding. It’s all really just symptomatic of our approach to chill work<\/a>, where we lead with trust and boundaries, and focus on outcomes over input.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I realize not every company is able to pull this off. Maybe it\u2019s your company culture or maybe it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s the chill way we hire and manage agencies and consultants at SparkToro.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We SMART-ly assess our needs first.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Maybe it\u2019s symptomatic of being such a lean team, but we\u2019re really careful with how we spend money. We\u2019ll only hire people if we really<\/em> need the help. And by \u201creally needing the help,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Depending on the role or project you\u2019re looking to hire a consultant for, it might be a good idea to consider writing a job description. When we hired Brendan Hufford<\/a> last year to fill in for me<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019re hiring an agency, you might not need a job description. Instead, it might be helpful to write out some specific goals. If there\u2019s one great takeaway I learned from corporate life (and yeah, I\u2019m pretty sure there\u2019s only one great takeaway) it\u2019s SMART goals<\/a>: 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I often like to think of this as, \u201cWhat job will this goal do for me?\u201d 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\u2019s hard to figure out a short list of agencies to consider. So I\u2019d 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<\/a>, VP Marketing at Clutch.co<\/a>. Check out the episode and writeup<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n