Evolving from Managing Projects to Growing Accounts

Peter Kang (00:00.679) you Sei-Wook Kim (00:06.626) In this episode, we talk about what really changes when an agency evolves from managing single work streams to multiple work streams with accounts, and why account management and program management has to grow up along with it. We draw on our own wins and failures as agency operators and dig into how to staff, structure, and segment accounts so growth doesn't turn into chaos in turn. Peter Kang (00:22.118) All right, so this is something that's pretty relevant for some of our growing agencies. One way to set the table is, when agencies are in their infancy or earlier days, many of them start with single work streams with clients. So that might be a project, let's say a website redesign, or it might be a single retainer, let's say an email retention retainer or maybe an SEO retainer. And you're just stacking those single work streams per client on top of each other and trying to manage as many as you can. And maybe that gets assigned to an account manager or project manager who handles a bunch of these as a pod. As you do a great job for clients, sometimes the clients are like, hey, we got more stuff for you to help us with. And that's when you go from a single workstream to multiple workstreams. And this is what we're here to talk about today. Sei-Wook Kim (01:33.549) Yeah, definitely. The concept here is thinking about project management where you have single work streams to this concept of program management where you're addressing multiple different projects or lines of work with a single client. Peter Kang (01:49.763) Yeah, maybe we can dive into more of the specifics of that. When you go from a single workstream to multiple workstreams, what actually changes? What are some of the things that agencies should be aware of — hey, these are some new challenges or complications that arise? Sei-Wook Kim (02:09.441) Yeah, usually when you have distinct different work streams, there might be different stakeholders on the client side. So somebody that manages email could be different than someone who manages a website. So there's just more people to interface with, who are responsible for the different projects and work streams that you're working on. Peter Kang (02:34.437) But also on the client side, right? So you're saying on the client side, there might be somebody — let's say a director of e-comm does one thing, but then there might be somebody who's more brand marketing or more analytics or whatever, who has different responsibilities. Sei-Wook Kim (02:48.705) Yep. And internally, both on the client side, there could be more and more interdependencies. It's not just parallel projects that don't have to talk to each other. Let's say an email has to trigger a landing page. Suddenly the web team needs to know to create a landing page that the email team is sending traffic to. So there's more and more coordination that's required there. Peter Kang (03:13.336) Yeah. And then in terms of managing all these work streams, what happens there? Sei-Wook Kim (03:20.232) Yeah, then you start to have multiple deadlines. If you work on one project, everything happens pretty linearly. Now you can have the email, the web, the SEO deadlines all happening at the same time. So if it's the same team internally or the same person managing it, it can be a higher cognitive load on the account managers or the project managers. Yeah. Peter Kang (03:47.298) Yeah. And then the other part is obviously the planning and the scoping and just how does this all tie to helping deliver results for the client. We've experienced it ourselves where you can have a lot of work streams, but if they don't have a deliberate overarching strategy to it, it could be wasteful or just not as effective. Sei-Wook Kim (04:13.576) Yeah, and then there are definitely opportunities for misalignment. If you're just thinking about things in silos, you don't realize how things get interconnected and there could be differing priorities or goals that could cause some conflict between teams. Peter Kang (04:30.114) Yeah, so before we dive into some tactical and specific ways that smaller agencies can evolve to a multi-workstream shop, let's talk about how the big boys do it — the big agencies that have this infrastructure really built out. Some of this obviously has been an evolution for them as well as they've scaled and dealt with complexity, huge multinational global clients. But what have we observed from the big agencies? Sei-Wook Kim (05:03.883) Yeah, there are definitely a few different levels. I'll start at the highest level, which I'll call account leadership. Account leadership is in place to handle the senior relationship with the client and their top priority is business growth and managing — yeah, they're not at the project level. It's all about the relationship and the goal setting. Working with that is program management. Program management oversees the entire ecosystem of the different workstreams. They are responsible for orchestrating when things happen, who needs to talk to who — they have the top-level view of all the different workstreams happening. And then you have workstream leads who handle their own workstream-level strategy and delivery. To our examples earlier, there could be a web workstream in one area, an email workstream in another area. They're each responsible for delivering and the strategy at that tactical level. Peter Kang (06:19.268) Yeah, and for these big global agencies, it could be like some folks managing certain channels — some traditional stuff, some social media type of stuff — and even within that you could have multiple work streams. So there are layers to this as you scale and get bigger and bigger. Sei-Wook Kim (06:35.658) Yeah, and definitely from a cadence and planning standpoint, quarterly planning becomes more and more important — bigger planning sessions where you're looking out at the next quarter, but also the next year, having longer visibility into everything that's happening. And then from that, there's a lot more demand on the team to have clear documentation and brief writing to be used across work streams that bubble up and are related to the overarching goal. Peter Kang (07:14.39) Yep. And just going back to what you said about account leadership — one of the things we're actually not doing is assigning specific titles to these levels, because depending on the agency they're called very different things. Account leadership could be led by a managing partner or a global account director or whoever — there are so many different ways to label these things. And even at the program management level, even at the workstream level, people are called different things. So we're just avoiding assigning specific titles. But at the account leadership level, the other piece is the strategic oversight, the vision, the co-creation of the vision with the client on what they want to achieve. How does that bubble up to account leadership and also work its way down to the rest of the team? Sei-Wook Kim (08:10.058) Yeah, the big thing there is having different roles so that it's not one person handling all of it, and having that clear separation between responsibilities. And then having ongoing communication to make sure that everyone is aligned. Account leadership needs to communicate with program management to know what the priorities are, program management needs to talk with the workstream leads to know in what order to do things, and then vice versa — if there are issues, they bubble up the other direction and account management is responsible for smoothing that over with the clients. Peter Kang (08:51.71) Yeah, and one thing you take away from this is that at the account leadership level, these folks really have to be great at relationship building, seeing opportunities, but also driving the overall strategy — which means understanding the business of the client very deeply. Cool, so let's talk about what smaller agencies can learn. I think we can weave in some of our own experiences as well. But what are some simple things that smaller agencies — mostly single-workstream right now, but maybe starting to get a few multiple-workstream clients here and there — can learn? Sei-Wook Kim (09:34.813) Yeah, thinking about it at a smaller scale, it's about separating client leadership or the relationship-level activities from the execution coordination. So that could be agency leadership being the main relationship with the client, and then you might have project managers handling the day-to-day execution of different work streams. Just having some separation between execution and strategy and leadership. Peter Kang (10:04.838) Yeah, basically one way to invert that is to avoid a situation where you — let's say you're the agency founder, you have a client giving you multiple work streams, and you're like, hey PM, you handle everything, including the client relationship. That's when things could go wrong. Sei-Wook Kim (10:22.556) Yeah, definitely. Cool. Another thing is thinking about the cadence of communication. We talked before about having those quarterly planning sessions — you can bubble it down from quarterly planning to monthly, taking a look at the strategy and what's changing, to maybe a weekly internal cadence and sync so that all the different work streams are synced up on exactly what the other teams are working on. More work streams means more complexity, so more communication to help with that. Peter Kang (11:05.082) Yeah, and a lot of the conversations are around client status — is there anything that's problematic or that we need to flag early as something to address? Because this is how you ensure the relationship is healthy and all the different team members are hitting on all cylinders. Cool. And then you mentioned earlier some of the communication between the levels — maybe talk more about escalation paths and what they're useful for, especially for small agencies. What should they prioritize? Sei-Wook Kim (11:39.148) Yeah, a lot of things could bubble up, but more commonly as you work through an engagement, it's things like scope creep — a contact at one work stream is asking for more things. Is that something that can be resolved at the work stream level, or should it be escalated to the account leadership who can then either ask for more budget or try to smooth things over? And it doesn't have to be a scope issue — if there's a missed deadline or an issue with execution, being clear on who handles what kinds of communication, so it's not the project-level people having conversations that should be happening at the client leadership level. Peter Kang (12:28.774) Yeah, that's key. You mentioned documentation is important. Can you touch on brief writing? A lot of small agencies aren't used to that. What are some takeaways for small agencies to adopt the practice of brief writing, and how should we think about that? Sei-Wook Kim (12:46.831) Yeah, we've seen a varying level of complexity of brief writing, but it starts with onboarding and having a clear document outlining: who is the client, what is our history with them, what are all the work streams, what's happening in their business that could affect us? And then the briefs could go into exactly what the initiative is, you talk about parallel work that's happening at the agency, and what are the key goals we're trying to achieve through that. It's adding one more step to think about what are other people doing that could affect the one work stream that I'm working on. Peter Kang (13:29.374) Yeah, and if you want to take it one level deeper, you could collaborate much more closely with the client and co-create the brief initially, get their sign-off, make sure everything is in a good place so that before you onboard your own team members, you've had that alignment with the client. Because one of the worst things we've experienced is when you write a brief, you onboard a team, they're working on something, but then the client is totally at odds with what they thought it was — and you could run into some real trouble then. Sei-Wook Kim (14:00.676) Yeah, one interesting thing that could also happen is your team could be more in sync than the client side. The client could have no idea that another team was working on a parallel initiative. But if you're working on a brief together, or they're in the loop, then they could be more in tune with all the work streams. Peter Kang (14:25.023) Yeah, that's a great point. Especially if you're working with multiple client stakeholders who aren't talking to each other — sometimes in the process of brief writing, you end up surfacing that for them so that they become more in sync with each other. So yeah, that's huge. Okay, cool. We're talking about a lot of this from our own experience, and a lot of it was a pretty painfully lived experience of not quite understanding the structure needed to support multiple work streams. Can you talk about a couple of examples from our days as agency operators? Let's go back to Barrel, when for a long time we were a single-workstream website redesign shop — people come in, you do the website, you're good to go. But then over time we layered things on because some clients needed multiple websites, and then sometimes we did email marketing, sometimes we did SEO, sometimes we added other services. And all of a sudden we were able to sell in a program — hey, we're going to help you grow over the next year and be really part of this transformation as you go to market with XYZ products or whatever. We'd sell these in, but more often than not we ran into some challenges. Maybe we could talk about a few examples where we did figure some stuff out, and where we fell a bit short. Sei-Wook Kim (16:00.697) Yeah. I'll name the brand: Kind Snacks. We did a lot of work for them over many years and the engagement started with redesigning and building their website. That had multiple stakeholders from the IT side and the brand side on their end, but it was still very much a single-workstream type of process. As that engagement came to a close, one workstream was maintaining the site — typically with the IT team or people on the technical side. But then there were many campaign needs. As a growing brand, they did initiatives like one with Kevin Durant where it's a whole new product line with a whole new brand, and suddenly you're working with a brand team and a team working on the advertising for this initiative, in parallel to some of the other work. And then they had a nonprofit arm that got created. So then we're working with a nonprofit team, and suddenly you have many parallel tracks touching, in some cases, the same technical foundation. And then email came into play — managing different monthly and weekly emails that have to go out. All of these had different stakeholders; a different person on the client team is handling each part. There's some coordination, but the same challenge we talked about where not everyone is talking to each other. Sometimes they expect IT to be the glue, but these are much larger things. The CMO is involved, but they're not really involved in the day-to-day. We had to take on that responsibility to organize things. From our journey, we had to grow into that structure. We were very much a project-management shop — we had producers who managed all the work. As things grew, company leadership became the effective account leaders, and then we introduced another layer called program management. At the time we called it an account lead. And then we had project managers or producers to do the execution on the work streams. It was an iterative process where we had to learn how to build an account team along the way over several years. Peter Kang (18:32.989) Yeah. In hindsight it's so clear where we made some mistakes. Some of the accounts that performed really well were ones where myself, you, a couple other leaders — we effectively played a heavy hand in both account leadership and program management. We were making sure everyone was coordinated and doing their thing. But the moment we got busy and took our eyes off program management, or weren't doing the account leadership to grow the account, a lot of things would fall apart. I think we hit a limit where with one, two, maybe three of these types of clients it was fine — we could juggle it. But the moment it became four, five, six of these types of accounts and we didn't have the personnel to serve as account leads or program managers, we would just ask some of our most effective producers to run with all of it — basically put all the responsibilities on them. The burnout rate was high. I can see in hindsight how much of a structural challenge it was for us to manage these accounts. Sei-Wook Kim (20:00.481) Yeah, we didn't have the mental model in place. For that account in particular, we didn't think about account leadership versus program management. We tried to push it down into the same role — saying, all right, your title is account lead, you should be able to do the strategic account manager work but also oversee all the different lines of work that are happening. It's two roles in one. And it never quite worked out because they're also likely working on many other things on top of that. Peter Kang (20:33.712) Yeah, exactly. And those are harder lessons. Part of it was just not knowing what we didn't know. And yeah, this is why I think it's good to study some of these more built-out larger agencies with the infrastructure, because there are things we can take from it. Obviously if you try to emulate exactly what they're doing it could be too heavy, so you've got to find that right middle ground. Sei-Wook Kim (21:04.033) For sure. Peter Kang (21:05.168) Yeah, one other story we can share is our experience with paid media — growth marketing — something we tried to expand into. At some point it was not an insignificant part of our revenue and we had grown it. But because we were web-first and this was something we added on top of that, selling it wasn't hard. It was compelling because at the time it was like, you're doing the web — hey, you can also do paid. You have one agency you can rely on to deliver all of this. We pitched hard on the synergies: you're going to get a great integrated experience from us. But the truth was we lacked the structure, because we didn't have that program management structure. And honestly, we didn't even have an account lead to set strategy on how web and paid might work together and bring it all together. It was very siloed. Some of the more painful moments were when I'd hear in meetings one team blaming the other for whatever issues. And it's like, my goodness, we're the same team here. For the client to hear that was embarrassing, and also really hurtful to how we present ourselves. I think we ended up phasing out the paid media and the growth team because there were a few instances where the performance of paid not coming through jeopardized the entire account. At that point the client is like, I don't care if web is good and paid is the problem — I just can't trust you guys as an agency. That risk scared us into getting rid of growth marketing. In hindsight, with good structure — a way for those teams to communicate better, plan better, have that operating rhythm of checking in together — we could have avoided these issues. Sei-Wook Kim (23:25.11) Yeah, and that is always a risk when you have multiple work streams and one of them takes down the rest of the relationship. What really matters there is having strong account leadership and that relationship with the client — building that trust, and for them to see the value you're providing beyond just the one work stream that could be faltering for a period of time. Working through that — that's the importance of having those separate levels. Peter Kang (23:56.184) Yeah, definitely. Okay, one more topic to touch on before we wrap up: client segmentation. We talked about the evolution from single workstream to multiple workstreams for a small agency. But the truth is it's not like overnight you go from only doing single to only doing multiple workstreams. There's going to be a period — and this happens for large agencies too — where you're going to have different types of accounts. Some will be super heavy, requiring a lot more team members and a lot more attention. And then there will be ones that are a bit more single-project-and-done, or just one retainer that's ongoing. So let's talk about client segmentation and how agencies should think about segmenting their clients. Sei-Wook Kim (24:51.487) Yeah, it's definitely not a one-size-fits-all solution. It's about thinking about the potential of accounts. Is there potential to get to a multi-workstream situation? Or does this client not have those needs, or are they very well-serviced in other areas, or maybe someone internal is handling it? If that's the case, it's not at least a short-term potential. And then — do you have access to a year-long budget so you can do some planning together? Do you have access to the senior stakeholders who make those decisions? If there's a really complicated org structure on the client side, that often means there's potential you can grow into and target more brands, more work streams within that one client. So that's identified as the high-potential, high-touch account that you put your attention on. Peter Kang (25:52.332) Yeah, and this is a worthwhile exercise for any agency — just go through your client roster. A term that's popular for this is identifying your key accounts. Once you identify your key accounts, you can figure out: these are accounts we're already doing a lot of work for, or hey, we're doing some work but it's picking up and it has high potential for growth, so we're going to put a lot of resources into that. At the same time, for the ones you identify as low potential, don't over-service or put too many resources into something that's going to have limited upside. Obviously do a good job and make sure you do what you've promised — but you've got to be smart about where you're putting your time and resources. Sei-Wook Kim (26:49.62) Yeah. And all these things we're talking about — it can be very expensive to have this layer of management for an account. If the account is small and has no potential, it can crush your margins really quickly if you overdo it on the structure standpoint. But for the right clients, it'll pay for itself, because the retention of the work and the growth potential of those accounts could absorb the increased overhead on the management end. Peter Kang (27:26.008) Yeah, not to mention it just brings the cost of sale down. Customer acquisition costs with existing clients go down quite a bit. If you take that into account, there is a critical mass — it'll vary depending on the agency — but it's not uncommon to have maybe a quarter million, half a million, a million dollar threshold for what some of these larger accounts should be, to support the team and the type of work needed to service them. You've got to think much bigger than the single-project mentality. Yep. All right, so that brings us to the end here. To sum it up — some lessons for smaller agencies as they think about going from single work streams to multiple work streams. Sei-Wook Kim (28:26.195) Yeah. When thinking about adding services in your agency, think about how you can coordinate and plan for it before you just start selling things in. Make sure the structure's in place, or at least think about the structure. And along those lines, don't just assume that a single person — like a project manager — can handle all the different work streams and potentially handle the client relationship at the same time. And as you continue to scale, think about how you can unify the work so it's not just three siloed teams reporting separately to clients who aren't talking to each other. Just think about the coordination on that side. Peter Kang (29:11.286) Yeah, definitely. And for account managers, just monitor their workloads — once you put an account on them it's quite a bit of responsibility, so just knowing there's only so much one person can do. We talked about our experience with paid media: don't assume clients will separate the good from the bad inside your agency. They'll often just evaluate the sum of everything. And then — plan before adding lanes to the work streams. And lastly, as you mentioned, program management can pay for itself, especially in margin and retention. Investing in it early is worthwhile. In hindsight, if we could do it again, we'd probably be more intentional about the structure we built out. Okay, great. That's what we have on this topic. Thanks for tuning in and we'll catch you next time. Sei-Wook Kim (30:25.693) Thanks.