Record Retention in the Midst of the Great Resignation
Record Retention in the Midst of the Great Resignation
Jim Reagan is a leader in the digital advertising world leveraging his experience with technology. He is an innovative and creative leader that adeptly manages resources to achieve the best possible results in sales and marketing, operations, and product development. He has proven experience with start-ups, business development and mobile marketing. His first-hand knowledge of search engine optimization empowers him to create the most targeting digital media campaigns.
Josh Sherwood is a managing partner of MediaOne. He has worked with top brands and technology partners in travel, auto, finance and more. Annual working budgets have ranged from thousands to over $20 million in a single annual budget. Brands include: Toyota, Hard Rock and their All-Inclusive Resorts collection, Pilot Pens, Cooper Tires and numerous DMOs.
September 7th, 2022
Watch the full webinar above, or read an abbreviated transcription of the interview below. Some text has been edited for clarity.
Hannah Lancaster: Today, we have two really special guests: Jim Reagan and Josh Sherwood from MediaOne. I'm gonna hand it over to Jim and Josh to give a quick introduction and a little history about MediaOne.
Jim Reagan: We started MediaOne in early 2016 as an organization to serve what we call mid-market clients, and provide them with digital services and digital media strategy and execution. We kind of hit a sweet spot there. Josh joined in early 2017, and from there we just really took off. Josh, anything you want to add?
Josh Sherwood: We started off as a small company and weren't sure if we really wanted to grow. I know we had several meetings where we wanted to stay at three people, and now here we are at 15. We're all fully remote.
Maintaining Culture as a Remote Team
HL: Yeah, that's amazing. What made you want to do remote so early on before people were really discussing Zoom? It was all sort of there, but nobody was really leveraging it yet. What made you decide to do that as you started adding different team members?
JR: I worked for a number of years for a startup out of Denver called SpotXchange; now it's Magnite. When they started, we had an office in Denver, but we had people all over the world and it seemed to work pretty well for them.
Honestly, we did it for cost savings, but it's worked well. As a CEO, you have to give up a little bit of control, which is not a bad thing. I think a lot of times, CEOs probably try to hold things too tightly, but if you hire the right kind of people and empower them, they'll do great work whether remote or in the office.
We have an intentionality of touchpoints with our meetings and we do a thing called a MediaOne summits twice a year where we bring the whole team together. We call it “collaborate, educate, and innovate” for the good of our clients. Then we do huddles by departments so that each department will get together in different cities and look at collaboration for innovation. Then we also have regular team calls. So we have a lot of touch points, and the culture side of it provides a lot of the glue to the fabric that keeps us rolling.
HL: What is some of that glue? What are some of the things that you feel changed that culture for you?
JR: I was reading a book called Winning by Jack Welch, and he said, “I've always had the best experience with hiring former pastors and HR,” and I thought that's kind of interesting. His reasoning was that pastors tend to be such great reads of people. So we hired Mike Robertson, a former pastor from Andy Stanley's staff in Atlanta, and Cynthia Reagan, who was also formerly in children's ministry, and they've formed the nucleus of our culture team.
That culture team has been a real game changer for us because it's not something that the CEO should lead. The CEO and managing partners need to be accountable to it, not lead it. Otherwise, it just comes across as bludgeoning people. We want a diversity of people and opinions and even some conflict. A lot of times, conflict is one of the best avenues of growth, but you have to learn how to do that, and how to do it the right way.
Leadership Opportunities through Specialization
HL: So in the midst of this great resignation, has there ever been any point that you guys have sort of shifted what you do, or is it these things that you've already foundationally put into place that have laid the groundwork?
JS: The one thing I would say is we started to develop pillars, and we started to give people specializations. They're not just managing campaigns and selling their basic tasks, but they're also finding something that they're passionate about. We really think that can lead to a lot more growth in one way. We're giving everybody that leadership opportunity to kind of take the bull by the horns and run a pillar and or some sort of business operation within the company.
One other thing, just to touch on what Jim was saying before on culture and retention: the most natural thing that came to us was having two people per account. You have a salesperson and a campaign manager, and both of those are senior-level people. We don't necessarily have a lot of junior-level people that we're giving tasks to for now, and that gives people a lot of independence and empowerment, and they're also building camaraderie. So each account has that teamwork being built into it, and I think that really gives everybody a sense of ownership, which goes a long way.
HL: How do you think that can be replicated in another business that doesn't have the same account structure or quite that same level of ownership?
JR: When you look at culture at a high level, it's working towards jointly held beliefs. Values are much better at guiding people to do the things you want them to do than rules or laws. You want people to be empowered, and again, especially if you're a remote company, to know those values and say, “okay, we're gonna operate this way. Here's the key components of our culture and how we want to approach the marketplace and our customers.”
HL: What are some of the things that you use for empowerment?
JR: We talked about “educate, innovate, collaborate” for our clients. That's internal as well. Right now with leadership, Cynthia and Mike have broken it down into personal leadership—leading yourself, leading a team and in the company, and then in the greater community at large. We have elements of our business where they team up and lead, but beyond that, it's just developing that mindset of a leader and taking ownership like a leader does.
JS: And on top of that, it's kind of a two-way street with trust. I know I came from a background of wanting to do everything myself and not delegating. I would think, “if it’s going to take me two hours to tell somebody how to do it, I can just have it done by then.” But if you do it that way, what we found is that you can't scale up. If you're the bottleneck, you're the limit of how much your company can grow.
You have to trust your employees to do the job that they're hired to do until they show that they aren't—that they can't do that and they're not accountable—which thankfully for us, they've been very accountable and very trustworthy. Everybody we've hired so far, we've given a lot of slack to be empowered and do what they need to do. Sometimes, of course, we're going to be there if they have questions and if there are things that come up. Sometimes we'll come in and maybe overrule, but we give that empowerment and a lot of independence. Because too, I don't want to be a micromanager. I don't find it fun to go and look over people's shoulders.
Case Study: Intra-preneurship
HL: Move us into talking about your case study, and that may tap into some of the things you guys are just talking about.
JS: So we call it “intrapreneurial” instead of “entrepreneurial.” It's basically being an entrepreneur inside your own business and giving them independence. In this case, our campaign manager—he's been working with us for a few years—he has an interest in data and analytics. So that's his pillar, and that's where he really wants to specialize. He’s developing a product and he’s marketing it every call we have as a team. He is going to tell you about his product. He wants to sell it, and we give a little skin in the game. We gave him the lead for our data and analytics pillar, and it's one of our five major pillars. On top of that, he's gone above and beyond, finding new tech platforms and data sources. He’s our go-to guy for all things digital, but he's also developed a product that we can sell and monetize. In less than six months, we've gone from zero revenue to over $55K, and I think we're easily going to hit six figures by Q1, maybe Q2 of 2023. That’s just by letting someone run with it. If I tried to control that, there would be the bottleneck and it would have probably not gotten off the ground.
Typically what it looks like is he'll come to us with questions like, “how does this look?” But he doesn't have to come every step of the way and ask, “can I do this? Can I do that?” We just say “run with it.”
JR: What we want to be able to do is for you to continue to grow within the company. This case study that Josh has shown you is an element where a person in our company has taken the initiative and is growing, and then he can build a team underneath him as part of that.
One other thing that I think is critical is that we have set up our pay structures where everybody gets a little commission—or I wouldn't call it “commission”—they get some shared profit from success. If we're successful, so are they.
Staying Accountable as a Leader
HL: What are the top three or five things that you feel like have been big game-changers for you? What are those things that have been impactful to you and your culture?
JR: Again, having a team or a person outside of the managing partners running HR, and us being accountable to it. There have been a few times where I've had to say, “I'm wrong, and I'm sorry. I shouldn't handled it that way. Here's the way I should have done that.” Which is an incredible opportunity. There’s a need for CEOs to go, “hey I messed up.”
We didn't mention that we've had a 92% client retention in the past seven years and 100% employee retention, so we’re really proud of that.
Q & A
HL: Yeah, that's amazing! Well, we have a couple of questions coming in. How are the pillars developed? And how often are new pillars rolled out?
JR: I've always thought that Steve Jobs was a pretty smart guy. He said you don't want to have more than four or five things that you're really known for. In their case, that was iPod, iPad, the iPhone, etc. That way you don't get too scattered. We take it on a case-by-case basis. We try to keep that within the sweet spot of our expertise and the expertise of our team. To Josh's point, in empowering our team, we want to utilize the skills and talents of our team to help grow the company. If somebody has a background in email marketing, and they see an opportunity within our client base to grow our email marketing, if that's another one of the pillars, then let's talk about that and build a plan to see if that's something we can do.
HL: Do you have any personality type assessments that you do with your team?
JR: Yeah, that’s a good one. We've used the Enneagram. We actually had an outside source come in, and we did each of the employees. We do one when we onboard a new employee. We’ll do one as a team—if you know anything about the Enneagram, we're a 2 as a team, which means we'd love to help everybody. Cynthia has been a leader in helping us interpret it—it's a tool that helps you to understand people, their motivations, ways that you can approach conflict resolution, or what's going to resonate with each person.
HL: What does mentoring and personalized career development look like for you? You spoke a little bit about that, but is there anything else that you would add on the mentoring side?
JS: One other quick thing I would add on the mentoring side is, it comes down to trusting our employees and not necessarily finger wagging or being the know-it-all. We come alongside them and walk in this journey with them. That way, we're both learning from each other, but having a little bit more experience and having different touchpoints, you kind of learn from each other. I think that's the way you mentor somebody is, again: it's not telling them what to do and how to do it, but it's just experiencing something together, and then finding the best ways to handle it. Oftentimes, they might teach me something too.
JR: Our culture team does a good job reaching out to employees and touching base with them periodically. “How are you doing? What's going on?” Then pouring into them, not just saying “we tried to do it.” We're not just working in silos, but we’re connecting with people. A lot of mentoring opportunities—those coachable moments—aren't scheduled. They happen in real time, in real life. We're big on correcting privately and celebrating publicly. I think that's really important. It’s the same thing when you're upset, you take it offline individually, together. We have a process for conflict resolution, and if you have to escalate it, then you do it to your supervisors. But we haven't had much of that, to be candid with you. So we’re very grateful. But we do have a process if we need it.
HL: Well, we are very excited that you guys have joined us today. This has just been really insightful and is something that's on everyone's mind. Thanks so much for joining!
JR: Thanks, Hannah! Have a good day.
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