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TRANSCRIPT:
DOUG: Megan, let’s start off how small agencies with can stay competitive and if AI plays a role. How can they be using it to stay competitive?
MEGAN: You know, one of the things that we’ve found, you know, over the last decade is small agencies’ ability to be nimble. And that’s at, of course, the direction of leadership. And it’s also just a function of not having many layers of management and oftentimes other factors that weigh into big agencies that, you know, play a role in how quick we can move. And so, I do think that at Approach, at least, we’ve been able to adopt AI much more quickly than some of our big agency counterparts as a result of that. I also think it has been an effort to jump in and experiment early. As we’re talking to our clients, you don’t have that ability, right? They wanted to get everything buttoned up first in a companywide position established, an enterprise platform established early on before people could start experimenting, but I found our approach a couple of years ago was like, let’s just try, experiment. Get comfortable using the technology. And so, I do think that that’s one of the reasons that small agencies have been able to level the playing field a little bit. We’re never going to have the resources that big agencies have. And so, that’s, of course, the challenge on the other side of that. And, really, we just have made an effort to say we’re going to make the investment because we know this is the direction that the industry is moving and we don’t want be left behind.
DOUG: Yeah. And so much about that is about the clients and how they interact as well. One of the things that you’ve taken a big step forward with is agentic AI, which we’ve covered on the podcast before. But you’ve actually built more than 80 custom AI agents for clients. Can you tell us about that process? And if there’s sort of a through line into the types of support you’re giving them with these agents?
MEGAN: Yeah. You know, one of the things we realized early on is that we weren’t going to be able to force our clients to adopt kind of generic tools. And as we were really pushing our clients in the direction of creating custom AI agents, we really had to sell the full story and talk through why they should care about this. So, yeah, we’ve created, you know, eighty plus. It’s probably more now, custom AI agents for clients. It started with an agent stack that every single client was going to get. Things that help us do our job better, easier, and more efficiently.
DOUG: What are some examples of that?
MEGAN: Yeah. So, like, trends spotting us as it relates to a specific client so that we’re getting you know, what are the reporters talking about this week in real time that relates to our clients? So, like, a lot of things that, you know, help us create custom content for them every single week, that’s going to automatically get fed into the inboxes of their team. We actually have five in that stack, different agents that we require our client experience directors to build and customize for their clients, but what’s been really cool is then the ability to have, you know, higher level conversations with clients and say, what are the things that you care about? Where are your feet being held to the fire? And that’s when we’ve gotten really creative in what we’ve been able to create. And for me, as a PR practitioner and someone in comms, it’s always been really, really difficult for us to tie our results directly to business outcomes, right? You know, we’re not doing performance marketing. And so, it’s difficult for us to do that, and our clients are very used to measurement in that way. And so, for me, that’s where we’ve really pushed our clients to go is to say, okay, how much of your data can we access? Can we get all the sales data? Can we get foot traffic walking into your locations? Because then we can get pretty creative with building agents that are going to help us link our efforts to that. To give you a specific example, we work with a multi-location client that was open to giving us access to everything. They’re like, you’re working in a protective environment. We’re really comfortable with you getting our daily sales reports. We’re comfortable with you getting everything that we have access to as far as sales in real time. And we’re implementing a pretty large scale community engagement program for them. So, if we’re doing, you know, really micro events in the neighborhoods that they operate in across the country, and what that has allowed us to do is be more nimble in our strategy with what’s working in real time. So, this agent will spit out a report every single day that says, okay, maybe we had thirteen different events across the country yesterday, and what showed ROI, what we spent, how long people stayed in there, what their food and beverage totals were. And so. we can say, okay, gosh, These type of events are performing way better than these. Let’s scrap, you know, all of the, sports sponsorships next month and really lean more into bar crawls or whatever it might be. And that’s what I think has been exciting with customizing these is when the clients get excited about it, they’re on board and they’re like, this is going to help us get a better ROI out of this program, and, you know, we’re willing to adapt and change in real time and say, like, this strategy needs to kind of evolve with us based on what we’re seeing. And that’s been exciting. It’s been really cool.
DOUG: Two of the topics that come up are both somewhat related. One is adoption within your employee base and client base, and the other is compliance issues. How do you navigate those issues?
MEGAN: Both great questions that we talked about early on as we were investing in our AI approach and building our AI strategy. At the time, a gentleman who sat on my advisory board was, you know, starting an AI firm, talking to us a lot about where we should go. And one of the things he kept bringing up is change management. And you almost need to be an expert in change management with this big of a transformation in your industry. So, we really did take a thoughtful approach to adoption, right? We have a senior level team. It’s one of the value propositions that we tee up to our clients. And what that means is, you know, they’ve been doing this for multiple decades, and they have their ways of doing things. And I get it. Changing, the way that you go about, you know, your everyday work can be frustrating, particularly when it involves learning a new technology that you might not fully understand and you certainly don’t know, you know, how to use.
DOUG: Other than that, it’s pretty easy to do it.
MEGAN: Yeah. I mean, right. I think that any anytime we’re going through a transformation like this, especially when people, you know, feel a little bit threatened by AI. And, you know, we’ve all heard it’s coming for our jobs. You know, as writers, as creators, AI can, you know, do a lot of the things that we have historically been doing. And so, we tried to take a thoughtful approach to this. We’ve tried to make it fun, and we’ve also, you know, put process and standard operating procedures around the way that we use AI to help people adopt. I’ll give you some examples. So, you know, I mentioned that custom stack of AI agents that we require every single one of our client experience directors, our account leads, to build for their specific client, and then, you know, they’re responsible for, making sure that they’re holding the team accountable for using them. You know, these aren’t coders, right? These are, you know, agency folks, client experience directors, but we said, you’re going to take a first pass at this, and then the consultancy that we hired is going to come in and, you know, help you work through all the bugs. So, it got them, you know, rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands dirty, you know, within this orchestration platform to build agents. We sent out a power user list every single week, and we kind of stack rank people on who’s adopting this. We had town halls every weekend where, you know, the consultancy we’re using were there. People could come in and ask questions, but they also could, you know, bring some of those brand and client challenges that they’re talking about on the front lines, you know, of our client business and talk through, is there a solve for this? Is there a tool that could help us operate more efficiently and, you know, really utilize our team’s time to the highest and best use, you know, of the client? And so, things like that, I think, helped everyone, you know, dive into the, you know, pool head first. And still we’re learning, right? We’re still trying to get It better at this every certainly doesn’t happen overnight, but I do feel like we’ve kind of rolled up our sleeves and said like, this is the direction this agency is going, so, you know, like, get on the bus. We are going to be in this together. You asked another question too, and that was about policy. You know, we learned very early on, again, at the advisory of, you know, this gentleman who sits on my board that we needed to put together an AI usage policy. We needed to feel, you know, really strongly about making sure that our clients understand how we’re using AI. They understand how we’re using their data, that we’re working in a really protective environment. And so, you know, we did that early. We published it on our website. We communicated that to all of our clients. And now, you know, it’s a part of our standard master service agreement. It’s in every single scope of work that we sign with clients, and it protects the clients too, as well as us. And so, yes, I think that being transparent is a number one.
DOUG: Couple of things that our companies share is the dedication to the employees and that’s also resulted in us having a twelve-year average tenure per employee and you having a similar experience. What are some of the things that you’re doing to retain people to help them balance? And I don’t love the word balance because I ideally like your workplace to inform and support your life and your life to support your work, but allow them to continue on that growth path.
MEGAN: Yeah. That’s a great question. I was actually with a client last night, took a client out to dinner, you know, with two folks on my team, and it came up as part of that conversation that, you know, one of the gals was celebrating her ten-year anniversary with us, and the other one was my first employee who was with us. She’s been with me for fourteen years. And I was so, just taken aback, you know, just hearing those numbers. And, yes, when we when I started this thing, you know, I wanted to build a place that people loved. And, you know, we say all the time, love your work, live your life. Our value proposition to our talent is not necessarily work life balance because I agree with you that’s almost impossible to achieve.
DOUG: And it makes it a zero-sum game if that’s the mindset. You enjoy life more, work is less. And we’re fortunate enough in this type of industry to have that flexibility.
MEGAN: A hundred percent, but to be perfectly honest, my why and one of the big reasons I started this agency is because I was working for a global firm and I wanted to start a family. And I saw the push and pull and the disconnect that that the current role I was in was going to offer me, you know, as I wanted to have children and be a mom alongside you know, climb the corporate ladder and have a big job. I didn’t see that working in the role that I was in. And so, I said, is there a different way of doing this? Is there, you know, a better model where we really can talk to our talent and say, you know, what are the parameters of your life? You know, I’m very, very comfortable with part-time work, and I think a lot of big agencies shy away from having part-time employees. If I find the right talent, I will figure out a spot for them. And as a result, you know, I do very much respect the time that they’re not working. And we build teams, and we create process, to make sure that that they can feel supported in that way, and the client is always going to feel supported. You know, to me, we’ve been doing this now for fifteen years. I don’t even think about it anymore, but I do think that there is a reason I have that tenure here. And similarly, there’s a reason that, you know, the vast majority of our team is working moms. And I think that that’s because, you know, we offer an opportunity to have a big job and being a mom. We’re very, very respectful of that. And I laugh, like, if you want to find a team that gets stuff done, hire moms. Moms can get stuff done.
DOUG: Yeah. We’ve got a number of them that are at our firm and they are pretty phenomenal in general and I’m married to one as well so that works out really well on that. I have to give kudos to you because most people would say, I want more free time to be with my family. I’m going start a successful business. That’s usually not the path to go hand in hand, but you’ve managed to do it. Any final thoughts you’d like to leave our audience with?
MEGAN: We’re in a moment in time right now that is unique and interesting with, you know, everything that AI is doing, you know, to change the way that we work. And, you know, one of the conversations I continue to have is about critical thinking and what AI is doing for, you know, the ability to take the last, you know, two decades of being in this industry and think critically about a communications challenge, a business challenge that my client is bringing to me. And, you know, the thing that I am really trying to push and, you know, lean into myself is there is a place for this technology in this industry. It makes us faster. It makes us more efficient. It makes, you know, us more informed. It’s that strategic and critical thinking layer on top of all that, I think that’s the direction that agencies need to move.
DOUG: Yeah. Well, Megan, it’s been great to speak with you. Thanks so much and continued success.
MEGAN: Thank you.
