If you’re caught in this cycle of being the agency hero, constantly swooping in to save the day, you might be the biggest obstacle to your own growth.
Today’s Social Pulse: Agency Edition, powered by Agorapulse, guest Igor Avidon knows this challenge intimately. Founder and CEO of Avidon Marketing Group, Igor has built a thriving agency by doing the opposite of what many agency owners do. His approach to leadership and agency growth has transformed not just his business but the way his clients view what’s possible with their own marketing.
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When did you realize being the agency “hero” wasn’t serving you or your business anymore?
Igor Avidon: I had this idea from the very beginning.
I don’t think that playing the hero in general is a requirement if you do the proper amount of preparatory work. And, ultimately, I think that it does get in the way of conducting good business, right? So, getting good results and making sure that everything is running smoothly.
It was pretty early on that I knew that I had to have teammates who were there to lift, to do the heavy lifting on their part, and make sure that everything was already lined up.
So that if ever there was a time when something needed advocacy or something needed to be reinforced to a client. We were basically already ready.
What were the first steps that you took to pull yourself away from that role and shift away from being the person with all the answers?
Igor Avidon: I think that the hiring methodology that I had employed from the very beginning is:
- Hire competent people
- Allow them to create the kind of sustainable processes and workflows that allow them to quickly pull together the kind of data and the kind of evidence of the results that our work generates, so that it is easy to assemble at a moment’s notice
Whenever we had to have a conversation with the client, who might have had questions about the campaign’s progress or the types of results we were achieving, it was very easy and obvious where I needed to go and how I needed to put it together.
Frankly, it’s a streamlined process at this point that we rarely have to get to now, but streamlining it from the very beginning with the individuals who are team leaders on my team makes it easy.
What specific strategies did you use to empower team members?
Igor Avidon: Yeah, so I think that people are naturally inclined towards wanting to lead, right? They want autonomy. I think that most professionals will prefer autonomy. They will prefer to have responsibilities that they are directly responsible for.
First of all, I vocalize it, right? I told them, “Look, my expectation is for you to be a professional and to do the work at the best level that you can do, and I will help you refine it. I will always provide onboarding and training, and further your knowledge base. But at the end of the day, it is ultimately on you to continue to drive yourself to be the best version of yourself in your role. And so, ultimately, you know that conversation starts at that point.”
I do think that most people respond positively to it because they’re excited to take that challenge head-on. Most of my team leaders were people who worked for me at a lower level and were promoted into the leadership positions because they simply embraced that challenge.
And that makes it very easy because you can, throughout the daily, weekly, and monthly workflows, see who steps up to the plate and takes ownership of their work and who doesn’t. It becomes very quickly evident who your team leaders are, where their strengths are, and where their weaknesses may be.
You can always shore those up, but the moment that you challenge them to step up is the moment that they either take the mantle and run with it or they shy away from it.
Could you share an example where letting go of control led to better results than if you had stepped in to save the day?
Igor Avidon: Yeah, so you know, quite a few instances like that. And it did come as a shocking realization to me that I don’t have all the answers, and maybe I’m not the right person to be addressing a particular query.
There were definitely times, for example, with data and analytics, when my team leader on that side had a much better expertise level and much higher understanding of it. And frankly, I simply had to pull him into the conversation. But the way that he addressed it and the way that he was able to explain it was simply better for the client, right? They had to understand the nuances of it. And there were things that I simply wasn’t necessarily aware of. And pulling that person into that conversation was definitely helpful. Now, I did have to act as a mediator, right?
So some of the more complex terminology, maybe, or complex concepts might have been a little bit—it could have been a little bit too overly complicated, but at the end of the day, even I didn’t know them until I had this explained to me by my team lead.
So, that probably would’ve been a good one.
How do you maintain quality, consistency, etc., for clients?
Igor Avidon: Yeah, there’s a learning curve. Nobody comes into any position fully prepared. And I think that this is where your weekly and monthly check-ins, especially weekly, especially early on when you bring somebody onto a particular role, I think those are important, right?
And so again, I think that the individuals who are thriving. I think those are the ones that are actively seeking out information from you. They’re actively seeking out more training. They’re asking you questions, right? And this is something that I strongly encourage in the company, that questions should be asked, because that means that you’re learning.
If you’re not asking questions, that means you’re probably stagnating, especially in our industry, with SEO and content marketing. There are just things that are constantly changing. Every core algorithm updates every year; there’s something new going on. So we have to stay ahead of the curve, and there’s always something to learn. I have to learn things myself as well. So we try to take that ongoing training seriously.
I think that most of my team still to this day asks me every single day or every single week for my opinion or kind of my take on a subject matter that is newer to our company, that is newer in the industry, and how we’re approaching every single campaign that we have on hand.
Are you using any particular framework for your agency to structure things like meetings and reports?
Igor Avidon: No, to be completely honest. I do prefer it to be much more organic.
I do think that there are time blocks that are when I’m more readily available for just random questions in a team chat. But generally speaking, something like a monthly call—we do hold monthly calls with each team lead just to make sure that everybody’s on the right page, that everything for the upcoming month is properly being planned and strategized.
But that’s more on a campaign-specific level. So, for every client campaign, we will talk about those campaigns, but naturally and organically, questions will pop up, and a team lead might ask me, Why are we doing it this way? I’m more than happy to explain. That’s like a training session.
And that’s, again, sometimes it’s a two-minute quick training, and sometimes it becomes a two-hour conversation where the overall methodology comes into play. We start to discuss why we’re doing things the way that we’re doing and why it’s different from how we did it five or seven years ago.
What has been the biggest challenge to this evolution in your leadership style?
Igor Avidon: Wow. The biggest challenge … There are quite a few. I think that fully delegating responsibilities and trusting our employees is always going to be difficult.
I am a bit of a control freak, but at the same time, I do understand the need to free up my bandwidth. Trusting my team leaders to make their own call in any given scenario has become a very important exercise for me. And I’m very happy to report that they are doing a very good job of that.
And it makes me happy, obviously, and it’s definitely fruitful, right? So that exercise, more often than not, is showing me that my team leaders are in a position to succeed, that they are thinking the right way, and that they are learning from our previous training experiences.
And it’s going smoothly so far!
What advice would you give folks like that who need to change? But they’re afraid to let go?
Igor Avidon: It’s the only way to grow, right? So you have to look at it almost as if it’s a financial decision. You cannot handle all the workload. That is simply impossible. And, ultimately, I do think that it benefits everybody.
I think it benefits your clients, right? You can bring on more clients by being able to handle more and more of a workload.
And it, frankly, benefits you. You are in a better position to grow your brand and to grow your agency.
I will say that I think that one of the big things that I did was tap into my immediate network. I think that the vast majority of the hires at our company have been through our immediate network. So we knew who we were hiring. We had references directly from existing employees and from friends about people who are very good and very passionate about what they do.
And so I think that’s been a critical tool for us. In terms of how we approach hiring, that makes it a lot easier to trust people with their expertise and their level of ownership.
Thank you for reading the recap highlights from this episode of Social Pulse: Agency Edition, powered by Agorapulse.
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