Three. Outcomes not Hours

The agency model of trading time for money never ceased to fascinate me, even at my first company. It makes zero sense, and doesn’t really work. Trading any resource – from cattle to commodities – is only sustainable when a universally accepted exchange rate exists for the resources in question. But there's no exchange rate in marketing. The agency price sheet is the wild west, and clients might as well be speculators buying swathes of prairie land with little-to-no idea of what they're actually getting. This is entry level economics: in the absence of exchange rates, regulation is replaced by the imbalance of capitalism. All this really means is that trades aren't fair, and one party almost always gets the better of the other. This also explains why the average timeframe for agency churn is under 3 years. 

I’ve noticed that brands seem to feel like they're getting a fair deal by paying for an hourly model. After all, hours are the accepted currency of marketing. What brands often don’t realize is that most of those hours get used up in the internal bloat of management and communication (more on this later), rather than execution of the actual outcome they hired the agency for. Usually, it’s not even the agency's fault. At a mid to large firm, one simple revision request can rack up thousands in billables because of the number of hands that request needs to travel through.  

Agencies obviously love hours. They’re objective and insular from results. They’re an easy way to place value on services and easy to recoup that value if the services fail. Even the most seasoned agencies can’t guarantee a result, but they know how many hours it took. And sometimes the actual cost of a project isn’t known until the end. In some cases, a high-touch client may require extra oversight, education, or collaboration. Hours provide an easy mechanism for the agency to track and recoup any additional investment as scopes shift. But hours – and validating hours – introduce a huge amount of bloat that the client doesn't want to pay for.  

The biggest problem of all is that the time for money model puts the focus on all the wrong outcomes. Brands don’t need hours from agencies, they need results. Agencies should not be incentivized to deliver more hours, they should be incentivized to deliver better results faster. 

There’s an extra step – bloat –  and it's confusing all of us.

Four. Bloat

To recap: brands don’t need hours from agencies, they need results. The current model incentivizes agencies to deliver more hours, not deliver better results. The industry calls it bloat, and removing it was the biggest challenge in building Zulu. 

Although we all hate bloat, it’s not always insidious. Rather, bloat is just a natural by-product of outsourcing work to third parties. The more complex the work, the more bloat, because each individual message and directive must be relayed through layers of account executives, project managers, executors. To deliver quality work, each one of these layers needs to be fully read in. When there’s a change, downstream impacts can spiral quickly.  

The larger the project, the more stakeholders that need to be read in. That’s why larger agencies have the most bloat, and often operate the slowest. It simply takes more hands and more communication to steer the Titanic. 

Over that first year, I spoke with other agency owners who ultimately confirmed our hypothesis: the only way to remove bloat was to remove the client. That’s a sinister statement, especially for a client reading this.

Five. Why?

When I hire vendor partners, I clearly define my expectations and goals, then turn the team loose to execute. When the project is delivered, I review their results and performance. If I don't like it, I ask questions and make comments, I might even fire them if the results are lackluster. But I never get involved in the process. Experience has demonstrated that inserting myself along the way simply adds bloat and slows things down. When I get in the way of our vendor partners, I decrease the likelihood of them delivering a good product. 

Clients rarely understand this. Brand managers want to manage and oversee each aspect of execution, not realizing that their revisions and comments – largely based on personal opinions and theories – are pulling focus and draining resources.  

Consider this: eCommerce is about moving fast – test, analyze, iterate and repeat. Bloat is the opposite of fast, But eCommerce agencies are often run like traditional creative firms where 30 rounds of client revisions are required for a single email flow. Is that necessary? Does it make sense in 2024? Weekly check-in meetings waste everyone's time while numbers are read from a report that everyone received two days ago and didn't read. Agency directors are forced to validate half baked results to brand managers who lack the full context of the project. 

We began to wonder – where and how can we remove the client from this process? How can we maintain the integrity of the work product being delivered? 

Six. The Plan

We analyzed every client workflow we could find from the past two years – onboarding, reviews, check-ins, etc – and looked at what was really necessary to deliver a high-performing product. As it turned out, most client touch points are double or triple redundant, or in some cases not necessary at all. It seemed like many of these were in place simply to validate hours, but held little functional purpose for either party. X In general, we found that most client touchpoints create additional work, redirect focus, and ultimately lead to confusion – which requires more management bloat to sift through behind the scenes. 

The initiatives with the least client interaction were the most productive and well received by the client. They were also completed in roughly half the time. These were profound numbers, and they showed us that by re-calibrating the client's role in our agency process, we could deliver better results and faster work within the same scope. 

The most important aspect of hands off client management is a mutual, and clear definition of success: i.e. goal setting. If everyone is aligned on goals at the start, it's easy to validate performance at the end. Agencies have a clear benchmark for success, and the brand can easily evaluate agency performance. To a large degree, this approach also removes the finger-pointing so common in the agency world when things go wrong. When a project is properly managed at the start – all resources provided, all expectations set, all goals briefed – there’s actually very little need for client involvement until the end. But it takes work to build that structure, and it can’t happen when you’re tied up on the merry-go-round. 

Seven. Core

Zulu Core is the evolved agency experience. A modern approach to eCommerce management, focusing entirely on the customer funnel. Organic ‘momentary’ marketing – emails, social and activation – require a high degree of client management by nature, so we removed them. Instead, we focus on optimizing the customer funnel, building a friction free shopping experience that converts more customers and supercharges your organic campaigns. 

Core is engineered from the top down to eliminate communication bloat, and re-purpose those saved resources toward outcomes. Backed by a full-stack agency, Core can scale to meet your momentary needs – development, creative, etc – but its primary purpose is to optimize your customer funnel and deliver just three high-impact outcomes each quarter: Customers, Frequency and Average Order Value. Along the way, our portal (fob.onezulu.us) enables hands-off management and puts the focus on goals and results, rather than billable hours and review meetings. 

Core is all about efficiency, and removing bloat from our relationship. Click here to schedule an intro and access the Overview Deck.