Shifting From an Agency-Centric Mindset

Sei-Wook Kim (00:06.991) Today, we're talking about a lens most agencies never apply to themselves. We tell clients constantly to talk to their customers and build empathy. Then we go back to our own agencies and skip the exercise entirely. We're going to walk through why agencies default to that and what changes when you flip the lens. Peter Kang (00:24.5) All right, Sei-Wook. This is something that we ourselves have been guilty of for years. Let's first talk a little bit about why this happens. The classic move when an agency is building a new offering — we get into a room, we list our capabilities, we think about what the cost is going to be, and then we go, hey, this is a new offering. A lot of services get built this way. And almost none of us ask whether this is actually what the client wants, or what we're trying to achieve in terms of outcomes for them. It just starts fundamentally with what it's going to cost us, who we have to do the work, and what we want to charge. That's the inside-out perspective in its purest form. Sei-Wook Kim (01:26.338) Yeah, and we've definitely been guilty of this over the years. Many agency leaders are too. It's the path of least resistance to getting to an offering — you're thinking about your team and what it takes to actually get the work done, but you don't really understand who you're building it for or what they want. Peter Kang (01:49.136) Yeah, one of the things that you and I talked about before we recorded was this idea of getting out of the building. Maybe we can dive into that. Sei-Wook Kim (02:01.515) Yeah, there are a lot of methodologies for people who do this work — things like lean startup. Lean startup taught a whole generation of founders to get out of the building, talk to your customers, stop making assumptions, and really try to learn from those conversations what patterns you can glean, and then build actually what people want, not what you think they want. And there's also the whole framework like jobs to be done, where it's all about having real conversations with customers and understanding their real motivations — what is the job that this service or product is doing for them. So it's funny that all of these methodologies exist, and we use them for the work we do for clients, we're telling them this is how you should approach your challenges and your customers. Agencies themselves don't do it for themselves. Peter Kang (03:02.74) Yeah, how many times have we run these interviews on behalf of our clients, built customer journey maps and everything — and then when it comes to our own business, we completely forget this. Maybe we should dive into why agencies default to the agency-centric lens instead of really getting out of the building. Beyond the surface level answer — which is that we know our services better than our clients do, so we lead with our capabilities and our strengths — what is that deeper answer? Sei-Wook Kim (03:52.343) The deeper answer is that most agencies don't really know who their client is. They might have a very broad definition like "we're targeting mid-market brands who need some digital capabilities," but that's just a broad category. It isn't truly defining who is the specific customer, who is the person, who are the stakeholders, what's important to them. You're not getting beyond the high level of the category and understanding the specific person that is your customer. Peter Kang (04:34.003) Yeah, and that's a key point. When a client is a blob, the agency is forced to be agency-centric by default — there's no real outside that they can orient towards. We talked about this on episode 33 where we dove into ICPs, where this agency orientation versus client orientation exists. What we're talking about today goes a level deeper. It's obviously about defining who it is that you're serving, but then how does that impact other parts of the business? Not just your go-to-market, but how it impacts services, how you might be talking about clients internally. Those are the things we're going to dive into today and share the different dimensions across an agency business. Sei-Wook Kim (05:28.779) Awesome. Yeah, and we've talked about this at length in previous episodes. You mentioned episode 33, but also digging deeper into having a strong foundation. If you haven't checked out foundation.agencyhabits.com, that's a great way to dig deep and do an audit on your agency. Peter Kang (05:52.306) Yeah, that is our framework for agency positioning and we highly recommend you check it out — just having that foundation makes all the difference. So let's dive in. We came up with five different dimensions — concrete examples across an agency business of where things show up in an agency-centric lens and how you might flip them into a client-centric lens. I'll kick it off with service offering and pricing. The inside-out, agency-centric view is you list your capabilities, think about your costs, add margin, and go, hey, this is the offering. And the pricing logic is all about what it costs us to deliver and what our markup is. Now flip that to be client-centric, outside-in, and it's all about: what is this person or client or stakeholder trying to accomplish? What is this engagement worth to them if they're able to get the outcome they want? What will we build to get them there? And the pricing comes from the value of the outcome to the buyer, not the cost of the inputs to us. This is really the case against cost-plus pricing — figuring out costs and putting a markup on it is the default motion when you genuinely don't know what the outcome is worth to a specific buyer. Having better conversations with prospects, going deeper, understanding the value — that helps you figure out what they're willing to pay. Then you can go back and devise a solution that lets you deliver something to the client very profitably. Sei-Wook Kim (07:50.037) Yeah, that's a great point. Having that value conversation with the client is so important — beyond thinking about your service offering, but truly understanding what it is that the client is hoping to achieve through the work that you do together. Sei-Wook Kim (08:07.594) All right, the next dimension is event marketing. Most agencies know they should go to events where their clients exist, but let's think about it from both lenses. Inside-out: where should we show up to generate leads? Where should we show up to get our logo seen by clients? How can we fill our funnel? It's all about us being visible to buyers. But if you take the outside-in perspective, it's understanding where clients already go, what's important to them in their roles, what professional communities they're already part of. And when they go to events, what are they trying to get from it? What are they trying to learn? Who are they trying to meet? What's really valuable to them in the context of that room? So if you take an example of a conference, from a client's perspective, most clients aren't there to find an agency. From an agency's perspective, you might be there to find prospective clients and pitch them, but clients are really there to grow their career, learn from peers, get inspiration, and see how similar businesses are solving similar problems. It's really about understanding the actual reason why people go to industry events and thinking about how you speak to that audience in that room. Peter Kang (10:07.728) Yeah, this popped in my mind because you and I were recently in Miami for a conference for one of our agencies — a water treatment conference. Basically there were three different service providers, our agency being one of them, each giving a brief 10-minute presentation. Tucker, the founder of the agency we acquired, gave a presentation that was head and shoulders better than the others because it very much reflected this. He wasn't selling on capability or services at all. It was more like, look, AI exists and it's this big scary thing, but it can be tamed. He made it very entertaining — how do you tame the AI dragon. It was actionable, digestible, and entertaining content that helped the audience feel better about using AI to empower them day-to-day and how they could incorporate it into their marketing. No hard sells at all. And you come away from that thinking, man, I've got to talk to this guy, he's super helpful. I think that's a great example of how an agency can really show up at these events. Sei-Wook Kim (11:41.449) Yeah, and his lens was thinking about what is the outcome — how can AI help your business, how do you double your leads using AI — versus coming from a "here are all the things that we do with it." It's less about telling them what the agency does and more about the outcome they can achieve from using AI broadly. Peter Kang (12:05.367) Yeah, so good. Okay, so that was event marketing. If we take this to the content side — content marketing. The agency-centric approach is all about our content calendar, what do we want to publish, what makes us look smart, what trend should we weigh in on, what will get us engagement on LinkedIn. It's all about how does this make us look good. Flipping that, the client-centric lens is diving more deeply into what is our client actually typing into search to learn more about. What are the questions they might be embarrassed to ask their own team and would appreciate seeing show up on their feed. What are some things they might actually pay for if it were a course. Once you have that flip, it just opens the aperture on what you should be thinking about writing. Sei-Wook Kim (13:18.576) Yeah, it's funny because most agencies, if you think about what they're writing, it can be over-technical or over-jargony. The agency feels smart putting out all this jargon, but they're not necessarily thinking about whether the end buyer actually finds it useful or understands how it applies to them. It's really about balancing and understanding from the reader's perspective — can you help them with whatever it is you're trying to communicate? All right, the next dimension is status updates. This is in the regular course of business when you're providing updates to your clients. The inside-out approach is you share: here's what we did this week, here's what we shipped, here are the hours we used, here are the tickets we closed. It's just listing off what we did. Versus if you think about it from the client's perspective, outside-in, you frame it as: here's what we accomplished, here's where we are against your goal, here's what's working, here's what isn't working, here are the things we need from you to get further along. It's really thinking from the client's perspective about where the project sits for them. Quarterly business reviews are an interesting opportunity to share status in a way that really thinks about the client's business goals — hopefully you're doing it a bit more than quarterly, but that's always a good moment. And it's also a good opportunity to ask questions: what changed in the client's business, what industry dynamics have shifted, are there team changes that are affecting the work you're doing together? Those things could shift the priorities. But if you're not asking questions and you're just telling people what you did, you'll never get those insights. Peter Kang (15:33.298) Yeah, this is really about how you conduct communications with clients and what you prioritize and highlight as important. Ultimately, as much as agencies might have bad experiences with clients talking about hours, clients don't care about the hours. They care about whether the engagement is on track and actually making progress toward what they agreed upon. It's only when those things aren't happening that hours come in as a focal point — just as a proxy to discuss why something isn't on track or why they feel like they might be paying for something and not getting what they thought they would. It's such a fundamental shift in thinking once you move away from "here's what we did" to "how are we making progress for you?" Sei-Wook Kim (16:38.416) Yeah, it's a subtle shift. If you say, here's what we did, here are all the tasks we accomplished — the client is the audience but you're the subject. You're talking at them versus really understanding the other way around: how is this benefiting you as a client? Peter Kang (17:03.21) Yeah, that's a great point. Awesome. Okay, last dimension — how the team talks about the work. A lot of this is about culture. If you're stuck in that inside-out agency-centric mindset, the team's internal vocabulary is going to be mostly about effort and output. It's going to be like, here's what we shipped this week, we worked late to do this, we put in a lot of time, that was a lot of work, we had to crank through — and a lot of the energy and pride is tied to what the team did and how hard they worked. Nothing wrong with that — there's a craft aspect, and you want to feel good about the work you're doing. But if you flip it, you're shifting the team's vocabulary to be about the client's progress and the client's success. You can still work hard, you can still have the craftsmanship, but it's in service of the client's goals and they're tied together. It's more about: where is our client against their Q4 target, and how have we contributed to that? Did our website launch improve their conversion rate? Things like that reorient how the culture behaves, because it's not about us against them — it's about partnering with the client to achieve something together. It takes deliberate effort, because without deliberate activities and modeling, the default is to lean on effort and output. A good example here is Barrel — our Shopify CPG commerce agency. They have this client wins channel, which is really cool. They're continually sharing how their clients are becoming more successful and how they're having a hand in supporting that, sometimes with a bigger impact when a website launch or some activation has been particularly impactful. Regardless, it's all very client-centric, and it permeates through the culture. Sei-Wook Kim (20:02.7) Yeah, that's a good point. It shows up in a lot of different places — Slack channels where you can share wins, but even in team meetings and standups: what are you celebrating? Are you celebrating the work that you did — definitely important — but are you also celebrating the results of the work and how it helped your client, how they got a promotion after they launched this thing? Really thinking about it from the client's perspective in addition to what the team did internally. Peter Kang (20:38.507) Yeah, definitely. Ultimately, it's about modeling. Whoever's leading the agency plays a huge role in shaping the language and making sure the culture shifts this way. Sei-Wook Kim (20:57.124) Yeah, it's a reframe — what are you celebrating? Did we ship a lot and work really hard, or did clients actually make progress and achieve their goals? It seems obvious, but it's a very deliberate thing that you have to continue to do when talking about the work that you do. Yeah, thinking about some of the tensions when you're dealing with an inside-out versus outside-in approach — it can feel like you're always being a yes person if you're only thinking from the client's perspective. But think about doctors as an example. Doctors are patient-centric but not patient-pleasing. They still bring a point of view and can push back when they think the client is wrong. The orientation isn't just saying yes to whatever they say — you can still have a spine and a perspective and push back, but it means thinking about where they're coming from first versus just accepting everything at face value. Peter Kang (22:22.704) Yeah, and beyond that tension — we covered these five dimensions, but this permeates through the whole organization. One thing to understand is that it's not as simple as opening up your homepage and changing the headline and some copy and going, all right, we went from talking about ourselves to a client-centric view, so now we're good. That's a cosmetic change. This is really about a mindset and cultural shift. Sei-Wook Kim (23:00.374) Yeah, to that point — you still need a strong point of view from the agency. It's not just about what the client is saying. It's that mindset of knowing who you're oriented towards. It doesn't dilute what you as an agency stand for, but just understanding who you're in service of. You have a clear point of view, but who's your client and how do they benefit from that point of view. That's what we're saying here. Peter Kang (23:30.278) Yes. So that's a good way to wrap this up. Agencies fall into this agency-centric trap not because they're self-absorbed — although many of us probably are — but more because they haven't done the fundamental work of defining who their clients are, the foundation work that we continue to talk about. Take the time to do that hard work. Once you do, you can definitely set yourself up for a better mindset shift. Okay, thanks for joining us. Until next time, have a good one. Sei-Wook Kim (24:10.603) Thanks.