5 Lessons I Learning From Getting Fired
It's not personal, it's business...
“We Find It’s Always Better To Fire People On A Friday." - The Bob’s, Office Space
Late last month I found myself in the uncomfortable position of being told my services were no longer needed for a client I had taken on to handle their digital marketing.
While wasn’t surprised, it still hit me like a ton of bricks — it’s never fun to be told that you are not doing a good enough job. Going a level deeper, performance never improved at the rate in which we had hoped so a change was likely even if I was a little taken aback by how quickly the breakup unfolded. To compound the issue, we had structured the agreement based on long-term goals vs. short term comp so I had assumed we were in this for a longer haul but that turned out to be incorrect and was worse off in the wallet for it.
Consulting by its nature lends itself to time-bound engagements; you are not part of the organization and are typically brought in to solve a specific problem. After enough time has passed, you are either let go because there is no longer a problem OR because the problem continued to fester and you take the blame. Such is the risk with services business. However not all was lost, and I did get something from the experience….5 amazing lessons that will help you avoid some common pitiful when you start to take on clients of your own.
Want More E-commerce Tips? Subscribe Now!
5 Lessons I Learned From Being Fired
There is no crying in e-commerce and need to salvage the engagement by taking something positive away from the experience. Below are my 5 key takeaways and how you can position yourself for success after finding yourself in a similar experience.
Be Selective When Choosing Your Clients:
Signing a new client is exciting. You start to think about how you can help them accelerate their business, solve complicated problems, and star to think of yourself as part of the team (not the mention the positive impaction your own financial position!). However, all clients are not created equal and you need to ensure that your clients have the right attributes to be successful. Below are a few of the questions I typically ask when vetting a potential client.
Who is your customer? Does the client really know who is buying their products, or at least who they want to buy their product? This is not some esoteric question —The best marketing campaign in the world will not work if it’s not targeting a relevant audience. Your client needs to be able to give you the elevator pitch (we target high-income women between 24-30) and some data to support their comments.
Can you produce *a lot* of content? Content is king and the ability to tell a story is critical in building a brand, so you need to be sure that your client is able to crank out good content. This isn’t just about fluffy creative pieces - however much creative you think you need double it. If you think about how your set up your Facebook campaigns…There are two major variables 1) Audience and 2) Creative. You can tweak and refine your audiences but need a broad swath of creative to find out what really works for the brand.
Make Sure Your Skillset is Aligned with Their Goals: This is really where my recent engagement fell apart. My skillset is in scaling and growing something that already exists. I’m not a 0-1 product-market fit operator, and definitely not a ‘manager’ for a legacy brand. The client I was working for was as much of a start up as could be — no real sales volume, traffic was still really low, etc. Because of that, all of the advice that I was providing was misfit for the what the brand needed. I was trying to work on brand positioning and optimizing their ad performance when in reality what the brand needed was someone who wanted to hustle on blogs, HARO, managing their social accounts and be more into functional execution rather than strategic planning. What should I have done?
Done my homework: I looked at the brand and thought there was potential and assumed that we would be able to pivot into my vision. That was wrong and an arrogant approach. I should have done more analysis to really understand where the brand was today and the client’s expectations for the future.
Been clear on my experience and expertise: While it is true that I am fairly good at growing brands online, I am much better at making the train run faster versus building a train from scratch. If I would have said that I’m happy to help from the sidelines until the brand gets to a different stage then we would be in a total difference position today.
Analyze Your Time Commitment: This is another area where this engagement ran into some challenges; The brand owner is young, single and without kids while I am married with two kids under 3 which made scheduling a challenge. My expectations of the project were much more fluid and consultative than the client’s which started to cause some problems.
Over communicate your availability: I needed to do a better job of explaining my availability and how my time windows would function. Open to a meeting on a Saturday? Can’t do it, have a soccer practice and need to make it to Costco!
Get Specific About Expectations: This falls into the category of “sound easy, does hard.” The goals for the project were to ‘accelerate growth’ and ‘start driving sales’ where are admiral goals but that actual outcome of those goals is open to interpretation. What should I have done?
Be specific about the goals: This is a big one; You are looking for something like “for someone to come in, help us get better and build a path forward”. If the client say something like, “we need to double our ROAS” or “there are a lot of quick wins so 30% month-over-month growth makes sense” RUN! If it was so easy — they would do it themselves.
Set a time horizon: Aligning on how fast you should expect to see results is really important. Not only does this impact the relationship between the brand and agency, it has a dramatic impact on what strategies and tactics you put into the market. If you need to show sales immediately, you will have to lean heavier into paid advertising — you simply can’t ramp your organic channels fast enough. If the strategy was about build a brand over a longer period of time the focus should be on positioning and content development. There is no right or wrong answer for an approach, but regardless of the path forward you need to be clear on the timeline and understand what strategies will work within each bucket.
Always End on Good Terms: Should be a no brainer but the e-commerce world is small and it’s fairly probable that you will cross paths again. Not only will you likely cross paths again, but people talk and you don’t want a final impression to have a negative impact down the road. What can you do to end on good terms?
Finish any outstanding deliverables: You are a pro and need to act like one, finish whatever you were in the middle of (within reason) and give a clear update on what else is in flux.
Don’t show your anger: This is probably as hard for the client as it is for you, have some grace and undestanding that things don’t work.
This doesn’t have to be the end: If you see something that might be helpful don’t be afraid to send it along. Never know if that one thing you said can be the start of a new engagements
Conclusion:
Like most things, success with an agency comes down to communication more so than anything else. Make sure to over communicate and set expectations clearly in order to give the engagement the best chance at success.
Most importantly, remember it’s not personal, it’s business. Agency life means there is a clock on the engagement from the moment you start so maximize that window as long as you can!
Into the Amazon is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Looking to get started selling on Amazon?