Mandy discusses what its like to run a full-service advertising agency that specializes in B to B marketing and how she’s implementing new tactics to grow her business.

Tae: Can you tell me a little bit about how you came to be where you are at in your career?

Mandy: So, my dad owned the company before me, and I started here 11 years ago. Actually, I started even before that, as a co-op student, and went on shoots and stuff with my dad just to help out. So I’ve been around it forever, but I officially started here 11 years ago, and I told my dad I was just, you know, out of school, wasn’t really doing anything. And he was like, “Okay, you either need to go back to school, or get a job, or you can work with me if you’re interested.” And I was like, okay, well, I’ll do that for now, but I don’t want to stay and make it my career. And I think all it took was like a weekend and I was like, “Actually, I do!” So he started me as an assistant to basically whoever needed me, which was the best thing he could have done. Starting from the bottom, is the best thing in a family business, I think. And I got to learn every role. So now that I’m leading the team. I know what goes into their roles, and I can relate to them, but yeah, definitely started with my dad owning the company, but we’ve made sure, over the years, I’ve had lots of other mentors as well.

Tae: That’s pretty cool. I had no idea you had other mentors and started from the bottom on up. That’s pretty interesting to find out. Have you taken any additional schooling? Or has it been a  learning on the job kind of experience?

Mandy: No additional formal schooling, but we’re always doing Skillshare courses and things like that related to whatever we need to learn at the time. So always reading and trying to learn more about our industry and also the industries of all of our clients.

Tae:  What project management tools or systems do you use to keep track of your projects, make sure they get done on time, that kind of thing?

Mandy: Yeah, we use Hive. I forget what we used before Hive, but it wasn’t working for us anymore, and we went through probably an eight month process of interviewing different companies and deciding which one was best for us, and Hive has been the best thing done in the last year. I just recommended it to another agency owner in Hamilton, and she said it’s exactly what she’s been looking for. We manage all of our resourcing on there so we can see, like each designer, what capacity they’re at for the day and so forth. Super easy to drag and drop things around. Everything is super customizable. So some clients are even in it for approving their work within Hive, which is cutting down on emails and adds a lot of transparency in there for them to see where we’re at on everything. The one we had before didn’t have much ability to customize to our needs. So this one definitely makes us feel like we’re in charge.

Tae:  That’s fantastic. Nice, well rounded program that takes care of everything. I like that. How do you stay ahead of marketing trends and ensure your strategies remain effective?

Mandy: Something we’ve done lately, because obviously things change really fast, and it’s hard to stay up on trends when you’re really just trying to get projects done, is we started with subcommittees this year. On our team, everyone has kind of different areas that they’re most interested in. So we have, like, an AI subcommittee and a social media subcommittee, and sometimes we have subcommittees if it’s something that’s always changing and we want to make sure that group is meeting often. Then we’ll have task forces for things that we felt we needed such as our web procedures. So we had a Web Task Force, and we hand picked who we wanted in a task force versus a sub committee of whoever’s interested in that. So we’ve got a few different sub committees, and their job is really to be researching and staying on top of trends and then reporting back to the whole team.

Tae: Cool. Cool. Cool. Before I go on to the next question, can I get you just to describe your business and how big it is, like, how many people and what you specialize in, and that kind of thing?

Mandy: Yeah, so we would consider ourselves a full service marketing agency. We have 15 team members now, some on the client services side that are responsible for all of the strategy and being the link between our team and the client, and then the studio team that has videography, graphic design and copywriting. We don’t specialize in a specific industry. We definitely have a lot more B to B. We have a lot in the trades, but we also have B to C clients, and we purposely don’t specialize in one industry. But really, medium sized businesses. Small is too small for us, and large right now is too large for us. But we’re working on some new services that would kind of bring our client base to more of a large company.

Tae: How do you set yourself apart from other agencies?

Mandy:  In a way, I feel like we don’t. There’s lots of agencies out there, and sometimes it comes down to fit with personalities. You know, I’m under no illusion that we’re the only agency in the world, and I think there’s enough business to go around for all of the good agencies out there. I think that our full service does set us a little bit apart. We rarely have any subcontracted team members. Everyone is in house, whether that sets us apart or not, it just allows us to keep control of everything. But we do get a lot of clients that kind of have, like, “Oh, I did web here and video here, and social media here.” and we want to bring it all into one company to keep it cohesive. So I think that sets us apart from some, but again, there’s lots of full service agencies out there. So my answer is kind of, we try to find our edge, and we are working on some services that will give us more of an edge. But I also think no one sets their self fully apart. Sometimes it just comes down to, you know, people buy from people, and they’re going to choose who they connect most with, and the culture of our team has to be a fit for the culture of the client’s team.

Tae: Yes, I 100% agree. I mean, I know, whenever I do those marketing plans for my own business, they’re always saying, what sets you apart and I mean, I don’t really know, because I’m good at what I do, but there’s lots of other people that are good at what they do, and maybe my style fits the project of a client, and maybe it doesn’t. Maybe they need the style of another photographer. There’s so many different photographers out there that are good, and sometimes it just comes down to who you know and who you like working with.

Mandy: And a lot of times, you know, we will be do cold outreach, and we’ll be prospecting, and they’re like, “Oh, we already have an agency.”. And the first thing I say is, “If you’re happy with them, I don’t even want a meeting with you.” I don’t want someone stealing my happy clients away. If I can steal someone’s client away, then they weren’t happy in the first place. But I don’t even want the meeting if they have an agency that’s working well for them, because if they’re working well, we’re not going to do better. You know, they already have a good fit. Leave it. There’s enough business to go around

Tae: Exactly. Okay, what is your primary method of attracting clients, and has it evolved over time, or has it kind of stayed the same?

Mandy: It used to be connected a lot to Barry’s name (my dad), like almost to a detriment, where people would know who Barry was and didn’t even realize what he did. So he would lose out on business. And we’d be like, “Why’d you go to that agency?” And they say, “I didn’t know you did that.” He just had more of a profile than TDG. So that’s something we consciously don’t want to do. We want the brand to be TDG and well, yeah, it usually is me out talking to people but I’m talking about TDG, not about myself. So I do a lot of in person networking and try and meet people, build stronger relationships with our current clients, ask for referrals. But we also have two people that are doing, you know, more traditional prospecting and cold outreach, and both have yielded good results.

Tae: That’s fantastic! How do you measure the success of a campaign?

Mandy: It totally depends on the campaign and the industry. I mean, in every campaign we do we’re going to start by outlining what the client’s goals are. So I think their goals are really what measure the success. We just did a campaign where the goal was to get people signing up for their subscription service, like a television streaming service. That’s obviously the goal. So I can talk all I want about click through rates and all that, but if they didn’t get people signing up, then it wasn’t successful. In other campaigns it’s awareness. So the cost per impressions is the goal. We have a wide range of clients, so I think the success really does differ for each one, but if we’re meeting their goals that they’ve outlined at the beginning of the campaign, and those goals are doable. I mean, some clients are going want to get this huge amount of signups or whatever, and that’s not going to be possible with that budget. But as long as we’ve agreed on goals up front and we’re meeting those, then I would consider it successful.

Tae: Good, good. Okay, in regards to projects, how do you decide on what kind of imagery you need for a campaign, and how do you go about getting it imagery?

Mandy: That’s usually a decision at the designer level. They kind of have their own vision. Sometimes it’s the client deciding on it as well. And we also work with a lot of clients where they have a huge library of images. For example, one of our clients is a large tire distributor. Well, we have to use the tires that they’re distributing. We don’t have a ton of choice there. We can’t just use stock images. We do have a photographer in house, so sometimes he’s going out and getting images and we also have subscriptions to stock libraries and things like that. Yeah, I think it depends on the situation. We have outsourced photography before if we feel it’s out of our wheelhouse. We had our largest client asked us about doing headshots in Toronto, and we were like, no, I don’t want to jeopardize a good client relationship by providing a service that I don’t think is our strong point.

Tae: What’s the biggest challenge you faced in growing your agency, and how did you overcome it?

Mandy: I think we made the mistake that lots of companies do, where you kind of have all your eggs in one basket. We had one really large client and we were humming along so well that it didn’t even take us much work anymore. So it was very, very profitable. Then the person running that company left, and that’s always when you’re vulnerable. So I think we have learned more small clients is a good thing so if one is going to leave, it’s not as scary. We’ve also been really putting energy into new business development over the last year to try and make up what we lost on that big one, but always learning.

Tae: If you could go back in time and give yourself some advice, what would it? Any time, your choice.

Mandy: Think going back to probably six or six, five or six years ago, when I started in a leadership role. And that’s a big piece of what I do now, is lead the team. And I think when you’re very young and newly in leadership, it feels like you need to lead by telling people what to do. And I wish I could go back and I feel like we probably lost a couple team members along the way because I was not a good leader, and it was not a good environment. And I think I know now you lead by inspiring, and you want to find the people that are good at what they do, and let them do what they’re good at, instead of wanting everyone to do things the way you would do, or being micromanaging. So I think I’d go back to ‘new leadership Mandy’ and be like, “Okay, you’re not that important. These people are more important than you are.” and leading that way.

Tae:  Yeah, that’s cool. I like that. What is your favourite part of your job?

Mandy: Okay, I always joke that my favourite part of my job is clients, and my least favourite part of my job is clients. Depends on the day. But overall,I think I just really like that aspect of the job. Also,the industry is always changing. I like that. I get a mix in my role of being at my desk looking at how to grow the business, but also getting to be out talking to people. I like talking to people, but I’m both an introvert and extrovert so I also need the time to recover from talking to people too. 

Tae: So you’re a social introvert? 

Mandy: Yeah, I like that every day is different, and I like that it changes. That the industry changes all the time, and it’s fun to try and adapt quickly.

Tae: I would tend to agree with you on that, because I like the variety in my own job. You’re not always doing the same thing every day. You’re always going to different places, meeting new people. Learning new things. It’s interesting! And I like it.