How Digital Firms Are Different
Blair and David record a live episode at the Orpheum Theater in New Orleans for Bureau of Digital’s Owner Summit.
Thank you to Carl Smith and Lori Averitt at Bureau of Digital for hosting the live recording at the Owner Summit on February 7, 2020 in New Orleans. And thank you to the amazing staff at the Orpheum Theater for helping us with the production and staging!
Transcript
Marcus: You're listening to 2 Bobs: Conversations on the Art of Creative Entrepreneurship with David C. Baker and Blair Enns, and we are live from the Orpheum Theater in New Orleans.
Blair Enns: Thank you, everybody. It's like a chess match, isn't it?
David C. Baker: It feels weird, doesn't it?
Blair: Yes.
David: I don't have to look at you normally.
Blair: I like it better when I'm not looking at you when we do this.
David: Yes, that's why we don't do it on zoom.
Blair: Well, we've done this face to face twice before, always before a live audience. We're much more comfortable when we're at home in our studios, in our pajamas, but we're going to dive in today. David.
David: Blair.
Blair: Today we're going to talk about why digital firms are different or how they're different. Specifically, when is this internet fad going to blow over so we can get back to print ads and brochures. So we've got a list of I think it's 12 topics, 12 points where we see digital firms being different from analog firms and we're going to go back and forth. You'll take one, I'll challenge your point or add to it and vice versa. But first, let's talk about what it means to be a digital firm. It's probably a topic that comes up in an audience like this. Why are we even using that term?
David: I'm not sure why we are actually, I think we probably shouldn't be because who isn't digital nowadays and it seems like if you chart the history of design firms and ad agencies and then digital firms, it's like a lot of you here aren't digital except that you live in this age. You're doing some design work. [crosstalk]
Blair: You're just young. It's called marketing.
David: It's the new marketing firm more than anything. So it's interesting to think about it because there are folks here, there's some dev shops. That's what I traditionally think of when I think of digital, but then there are a lot of firms here that are not, they place digital ads. Some of them don't do that even, they're doing design work, so on. It's interesting. It's more the modern firm is the way I think of it.
Blair: Yes, I would agree with that. Now that we've just completely shattered the premise of this podcast, let's talk about 12 ways in which digital firms are different from analog firms.
David: Right. Should I start?
Blair: Why don't you start?
David: Okay. I'm struck by how as an industry we have so screwed this up. Every firm has PMs, not very many firms have AM's, and what happens in a world like that, and this is going to have to correct itself, I'll put money on that. It's going to have to correct yourself because when you have a firm that's driven by PM's without the traditional AM focus, then you're not quite sure how to grow accounts. It's very hard. PM's are not good at growing accounts. They're good at not losing accounts. They also miss social cues and it takes a rare client that is willing to deal through a tough stretch of the relationship with a PM versus an AM.
In fact, I was listening to several conversations earlier and a lot of you don't even think you can charge for PM work much less AM work. That just blows me away. You all are just really wrong as a group. Oh sorry, I need a--
[laughter]
Blair: David C. Baker, ladies and gentlemen. Just to clarify, PM being project Management, AM being account management for those listening at home. We're not talking about time of day. The argument and I heard it, I was working with a group of firms earlier this week here in New Orleans and I heard somebody just casually say, of course in our industry, we can't charge for account management. I didn't say anything, but I immediately thought of you. I hear that all the time. We can't charge for account management and your argument is you cannot only charge for it, your better clients will pay for it, you'll become more effective and more profitable because of it. Is that correct?
David: It is the largest area where we have missed the boat and we're going to have to catch up with ourselves. Account management is 12% to 13% of all the labor at your firm. Whether they're called account managers or not, that's what they're doing, and if you don't think of them as needing to be account managers, then you'll have PM's doing stuff that they're not comfortable with.
Blair: Okay. That's great. That's point number one is that AM-PM split is different in digital firms.
David: Can I stay up here or-
Blair: Can you stay up here?
David: All right. Okay. Your turn.
Blair: I'll lead with one of my pet peeves. I addressed this in a few paragraphs in my most recent book, Pricing Creativity: A Guide to Profit Beyond the Billable Hour.
David: That was an ad in case you didn't recognize that.
Blair: [laughs] It's called product placement and it's the conflict between agile project management and value-based pricing. This comes up all the time in digital shops and I don't think there needs to be a conflict here, but I think I understand the stated reasons. Agile shops think we can't deliver price certainty to a client or even to ourselves, therefore, the risk is too high for us to price based on the value that we create rather than on the inputs of time and materials and I don't think that's the case.
In fact, there are a lot of firms out there who are kind of more traditional waterfall-style firms who are scoping, who are planning, who are either delivering some variation of cost certainty to the client and sometimes putting compensation at risk so that they can earn more money. I think the fundamental reason we hear this argument from digital firms is owners of digital firms tend to be more engineering-based and the engineering mindset is one of risk mitigation, and time and materials is the lowest risk pricing model that you can use. It's where you push all of the risk to the client.
Now, value-based pricing where you have a version of value-based pricing at the extreme end of the spectrum would be contingency based value-based pricing where you don't get paid anything until you hit, you create the value that you've agreed to help create. That is the riskiest form of pricing. That's where you take all the risk away from the client, you take it all on yourself, so those are two extremes. Lowest risk to you, highest risk to the client is time and materials in any variation, selling sprints, whatever it is. The highest risk to you, lowest risk to the client is contingency-based value-based pricing and in between, there's an infinite number of ways to price and engineers tend towards the lowest risk end of the spectrum.
David: I think a lot of principals might be happy to simply getting paid for all the time they're spending, but once they get there, their eyes will be open to, all right, what's the next step, and if they're locked into hourly, there isn't a next step.
Blair: And you've done some research on the profitability of agile firms?
David: Yes, and it's not generally there. It's really hard.
Blair: But it's not generally there?
David: Right. There's an inverse relationship. Agile is a fantastic way to do great work. It's not a fantastic way to make a lot of money. I hope that changes.
Blair: Yes. Peter Drucker famously said, in business, all profit is derived from risk, so if you're not taking any risk, and I'm not saying your pricing model should be all risk all the time, but if you're never taking any risk in your pricing, you're less likely to be earning profit. Certainly, you're not earning an extraordinary profit. What's next on your list?
David: Next is thinking about positioning and there's been a lot of discussion about that, but firms in the digital space are still falling into traps. Not the same traps, but whereas a design firm would have said, we're a branding firm and everybody's a branding firm and we don't need another branding firm, yadda yadda, we've talked about that a lot. In this space, it's about usually digital transformation, that's the new branding word. But being here at this event, and I was really happy to be here, it's the first time I've been here. The people that would come up and talk with me, they're very aware of the fact that their positioning isn't where it needs to be.
It's almost like we're all at a big AA meeting and they're saying like, yes, I know my positioning really isn't good, I understand the positioning, but they don't feel this urgency about it and some of them do. It feels like there's a larger percentage of well-positioned firms than ever and the rest of the people know what that looks like and simply aren't at a place yet where they're willing to do it and they're orbiting this place where they'll eventually land the spacecraft and maybe it's this year or maybe it's in three years, so there's a higher awareness of positioning, but the same traps are there. It's instead of branding that now it's just digital transformation or whatever term we have.
Blair: There's definitely some momentum though. I think one of the stats that Carl shared this morning if I'm getting this right, 53% more digital firms this year than last year refer to themselves now as specialists. The trend is starting to go in the right direction.
David: Yes, and I think people are realizing without the right specialty, how in the world are we going to build a lead generation plan? What's next?
Blair: Next, it says in your handwriting strategy deficits so I'm going to try to decode that. It's just been harder for digital firms over the years. It's less likely that a digital firm is going to swim upstream and get the more lucrative, impactful, strategic elements of the engagements with clients and Carl made the joke this morning. He's sold digital strategy for years and he's still not sure what it is. That came up as a talking point.
I think the reason for that, again, it's a lot of the founders come from technology backgrounds or engineering backgrounds and there's more of a division between their IT client maybe and the C suite and they're less comfortable. Even if the CTO is in the C suite, they're less comfortable making that transition over into other elements of the business. Do you have any theories on that?
David: I think yes because usually the strategy has been already defined by the time they engage a digital firm. Where I see a lot more hope is the embracing of real UX work, which gives them a license to climb back upstream and to influence the shape of the project, so that's really good. I hope that as we embrace more and more UX work, UX is not just this phrase we're throwing around without ever having gone to a course on UX, understanding what UX really is. It does seem to me like within 10 years it will no longer be any designers, they'll all be UX people, but they won't have any different abilities and they have now.
It's sort of a mixed bag. But I want to clarify because something that Blair and have talked a lot about, we don't want this to come across as beating up the digital space at all, we-
Blair: We're going to end on kind warm words.
David: We have really, yes. We're going to hug each other and we're playing some music. It's not that it's just some of the differences that we've seen, and I love this space, but I look at it from the outside and just interesting. All right, the next one for me is content marketing. It's just a small observation but it's really been obvious to me over the last six or seven months.
I have this exercise I call drop and give me 20 where I say, all right, pretend I'm on a plane with you. We're both sitting up front and I've acted like I'm reading a book, so I don't have to talk to you and then when we're within 15 minutes of landing, I'll start to pretend to be friendly. Then I'll say, all right, what do you do and then it turns out to be in an industry that's sort of close to mine and my ears go up and I start listening carefully and I say, "But you're specialized in something that I'm not. We're in the same industry but different specialization," and at that moment, I want to have a conversation with you.
I want you to assume that I'm smart enough and that I know enough about your field but I want to have some aha moments when I talk to you. That's what drives the content that you might write for your lead generation plan, and digital firms really struggle to do that. They tend to gravitate towards topics that are more technical in nature that will resonate with their peers not their prospects. Digital firms really struggle with what to write about in a content-driven world because they're so into the tactical side of things. I guess we could tie a string between this and what you were talking about with strategy, right?
Blair: Yes.
David: It's I don't know how to get out of myself. I don't know what to talk about the things I should be talking about that occur before the work gets to me. So it's interesting how this slowly needs to change. We need to start and that's where UX I think has a really good opportunity to shed the light on this.
Blair: I think that content marketing and writing about more strategic elements of your clients' businesses is the opportunity to swim upstream and be seen as more strategic and get invited to the big kids' strategy table.
David: Yes.
Blair: All right. Next on my list is the platform. Digital firms are more likely to be tied to a platform. It's not necessarily a bad thing but I think probably like me when you're working with a firm and you realize that this is a Drupal shop, or a HubSpot Partner, or a Shopify firm. Pick your platform, there's a little part of you worries for them because you can be tied to a platform and send the message of being platform agnostic and that's probably the approach that I prefer. You say, "No, no, no we're open" but you're still angling to use the platform that you prefer.
I think that's okay. It doesn't affect your marketing but if you're a Drupal shop and then all of a sudden like Drupal is dead and they just haven't buried the body yet, and nobody's looking for Drupal firm New York, or whatever, then your marketing is just pulled out from under you. So I don't think it's a bad thing especially if you pick a good long term platform that isn't likely to be threatened. Like I know a few CRM shops that are just all in on Salesforce and I think that's probably a good longer-term bet. There are a lot of WordPress shops out there but they're not putting WordPress out there. I think that's fine. I just get a little bit nervous when somebody is visibly all in on a platform.
David: Like being a HubSpot certified would be an example of that. I said that not you, so if somebody wants to-
Blair: Or pick another one.
David: It's just the HubSpot ones tend to be a little bit more public with their platform. It's like somebody else is driving that bus and you can look at what's happened with two platforms, in particular, Magento one of them, where something has happened in their partner program and all of a sudden, all the referrals that were coming to you are no longer coming to you and you're left scrambling because the length of time it takes to spin that flywheel up and to get people to think of you differently can take years.
Positioning is a lot tougher for these firms isn't it? It's just is.
Blair: For digital firm, or for product, or platform?
David: Yes, for digital firms and even for platforms specific ones. It's much tougher to come up with a positioning that's going to last for a long time and not be dependent on what other people do for you.
Blair: You're skipping ahead to one of my topics.
David: Oh, I'm sorry.
Blair: What's next on your list?
David: On my list is partnerships. I have no idea why this is true but more firms in digital space come to the field with partnerships as opposed to just a single.
Blair: What kind of partnerships? Do you mean business partners and multiple owners of a firm?
David: Two principles or more. Two or more but usually it's two. My theory is that they're working together, they love the style. They love the culture, they love the approach and they just decided to do something together and then they slowly start adding people. There are some real good things and some less than good things about that.
On the tough side is you've got decision making that the rough edges get knocked off of that and it takes longer to build a decision and the decision usually isn't as risky because we have to follow whatever the most risk-averse principal wants, and so on. That's the part that's tougher. The good thing about it is that most of these partners and I haven't done any real scientific research on it, but a lot of these partnerships are good. It allows you to slowly slide into a gap where you love managing people or you love managing the technical team and this other person, the other partner loves new business and the content marketing side and whatever that is.
I don't know what to do with that information but there are more partnerships on the digital side, so whatever that means it's just true.
Blair: Is it because typically one partner is tech-driven one is designed driven?
David: No, usually they're both tech-driven and then one of them slowly migrates to another to either being design or sales driven or something like that.
Blair: Is there a collaborative nature about digital firms that doesn't exist in analog firms?
David: Absolutely, yes. In a good way, yes.
Blair: All right. We're going to pause for our sponsor break here, Marcus. I'm just kidding. We don't have a sponsor break.
David: You just throwing us all off.
[laughter]
Blair: But we have this mid-roll thing where Marcus plays the music and says something intelligent. This is a little running joke amongst ourselves, we're such horrible marketers. We keep meeting to sponsor own podcast and run commercials at the 15-minute mark. David, do you have any events or books coming up?
David: Thank you for asking that. I have four events but I don't have them on my website yet. The best way to find out about those is to make sure you get my weekly emails, but thank you for asking. What about you, Blair?
Blair: Well, thank you, David. I'm doing a two-day workshop in Miami next week and then a five-day workshop in Chicago in April called Mastery Week.
David: Are those any good?
Blair: I hear they're excellent. Thank you.
David: Okay.
Blair: This is the part where Marcus says, "We now return you to 2Bobs."
Marcus: Now, back to David and Blair".
David: Thank you, Marcus.
Blair: Thank you, Marcus. We brought Marcus with us.
It's my turn.
David: Your turn.
Blair: I really like this about digital firms. Digital firms tend to be more product-focused. I've been saying for years that owners of design firms that refer to their agencies or the businesses as design firms, I would say design isn't really-- If you're a design firm, you're in one of three businesses. You're either designing communications for your client's customers, so therefore you're in the marketing business. Design is really just the tool that you use to do what you do.
You're either in the marketing business or you're designing communications for non-customer audiences. Therefore, you're in the communications business, internal communications, or analyst communications, or you're in the product development business. So industrial design would design industrial products and digital design firms tend to design digital products. I really love the idea of building products because when you're building a product, you're building a thing that you can't hold the digital product technically, but you have this thing that you can point to that it's easy to ascribe value to it's easy for the clients to value.
You're creating part of the arsenal of your clients' businesses and I think when I think of the firms that I've worked with and encountered the make the most money, it's firms that make products. So that's what I really love about digital firms is the idea is that you build something that your client's customers use in the real world. It's the modern equivalent to the industrial design firm.
David: Are you also including firms that might decide to build a product that then for themselves that they sell?
Blair: Yes so that's a big topic that we've talked about before. We'll probably continue to talk about is most of these firms are customized- I'm going to talk about this next but most of these firms are customized services firms and then they'll end up building a product for a client and realize, "Oh, I could sell this to other clients," but I'll speak to that next. What's next on your list?
David: Next on my list is about personality and it's a little weird to talk about this but it's kind of interesting. I guess everything I've said is a little weird. By the way, we can't see you because of the lights or is anybody even here? I don't know.
[laughter]
Blair: It's empty, David.
David: People keep coming in as soon as I start talking and they start leaving as soon as you do. We want to say how much we appreciate so many of you listening to the podcast. I had no idea that it would be quite this popular and so many of you have come up and talked about how influential it's been and we just want to thank you for that. It's been really a labor of love. It's not a duty at all. We record every Friday at 1:00 PM Central and I just love the opportunity to do that. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. We enjoy doing it.
The ones that I'm going to talk about next is about personality profile. About 13, 14 years ago, I started to dabble in research around personality profiles and gave 21,000 personality profiles to people in this field. That created this wealth of data around what's the typical profile of a PM, of a developer, of a principle and so on. One of the things that I discovered was that, since a lot of you principles were dev-shop people at some point in your life, you came to your firm with that particular approach and if you're familiar with DISC, the DISC profile, then that's a heavy dose of S and C.
What happened is that who you were naturally, how you showed up naturally tended to show up in how you ran your firm and the kind of things you were doing. Just honestly, if I can say this, a lot of you are control freaks, you are, because what makes you successful as a principal is not your attention to detail or objectiveness or data driven-approach. That's what makes you successful as a developer but what makes you successful as a principal is that you are a high D or at least you're in the upper half of the D scale. When you put a high D and a high C together you end up with a control freak.
Blair: What's your profile David?
[laughter]
It's high D and high C, somebody once called it, the boss from hell.
David: The boss from hell, right, which I have no employees. It explains why I have no employees. There is this intensity that you bring to your work. You pay attention to process, you tend to make safe decisions after you think about them for a long time, you deliberate before you make those decisions and then once you make them, you stick with them. You're diligent, you're a perfectionist, you're a little slower to change.
It wasn't until recently when I started to notice, now I start to understand principles of digital firms, it's because of where they came from. The high S and C is what draws developers to that field and then so when you have a high S and C it then adds quite a bit of D to it. I hope this is all making sense, you might have to listen to this later and go look up some of these terms but it's just interesting to see how this has shaped that word, personality. You're a very high D and a very high I.
Blair: Highest I next D, I'm the classic persuader, new business person.
David: You sit next to somebody and you talk to them, I sit next to somebody and I'm immediately looking at ways to not talk to them.
Blair: When I sit down next to you on the plane where you're clearly avoiding me, I make it my goal to engage you because I know it's going to drive you crazy.
David: I know. I'm so low on the I scale. I'm in the unabomber section of-
[laughter]
Blair: Interestingly, you can't do new business if you have any S. Is that's true?
David: Yes, it is true. Unless you're doing telemarketing, then you can't do telemarketing without S.
Blair: Where you have to follow a script. Is that what you mean?
David: High I and S are telemarketers, they're very friendly people following the script but in your world, you can't be high S and do it-- Interesting.
Blair: Next on my list is productization, one of my favorite topics.
David: I want you to talk about this one for a while, because I find this is going to be very fascinating to them unlike your earlier points.
Blair: We're running ahead, are we? I noticed in the digital form ecosystem, there's a tendency towards productization of services. I have a couple different hypotheses on where this might come from but it's not universal, but it's so much more pronounced in the digital ecosystem than it is in the analog firm ecosystem. What I mean by that is you can think of all types of businesses, especially advisory types of businesses as customized services or productized services and they're entirely different cultures.
Generally speaking, most marketing firms or creative firms of any kind are and should remain customized services firms. In a customized services firm, you have a small number of clients, ongoing clients at any one time. Just put aside, if you ever got maintenance clients just put those aside because that's kind of a productized service offering, we'll come back to that. You've got eight to 12, maybe 15 ongoing clients at any one time and each in a customized services business, its new business is not a volume game it's a highly targeted game.
When you close a piece of new business, you are going in the sale itself, you're going really deep into the conversation about the peculiarities and the uniqueness and the unique needs of that client. Because every engagement is bespoke, every engagement is a creative act, every proposal is a uniquely creative act and therefore, every price should be a creative act.
On the other end of the spectrum you have a product company or a productized services company. In a productized services company you are pursuing volume, you've taken your services and you've put them into set packages, set prices and there are all kinds of benefits to this and there's some trade-offs. What happens with these customized services firms, and again, it happens a lot more in the digital world is, you see productization as an advantage, as something that you'd like to have.
The reason you'd like to have it is, it's easier to sell. The sales cycle gets easier, we'll just sell fewer things, we've done this a couple of times, we'll just package it up and sell it. You become a less effective of a sales person. You're not going deep in, as soon as you have things to sell you actually quit listing. I know I've seen this repeatedly, if you see every client as a blank slate of opportunity and you just open yourself up to, what is your challenge? What's the opportunity to create value here? You take all of the limitations off of what the engagement might be.
As soon as you have products to sell, you start to come across somebody selling products, you quit listening deeply to the client, they're talking and you're trying to match the right product to them. Productization works when there's an opportunity for a lot of scale. You cannot pursue effectively, profitably, productization without scale because there's a trade-off. In a customized services firm, every engagement is bespoke, therefore, you can't really compare what you did with one client to another client. Productized services firms, you build your products for averages towards averages.
There's a great book called, The End of Average, which points out that, it really doesn't matter how big the cohort of the sample size is when somebody takes an average of something and makes a decision based on the average. When you go back in and look at the number of people or situations that meet the average, the answer is almost always zero no matter how many, how big the sample is.
Think of it this way, when your productizing your services, you're building products for the average in a segment and nobody exactly meets that average. So when they're buying from you, they're not getting exactly what they need, they're making a compromise. Why would they be willing to make that compromise? The answer is price, you can sell it to them for a lower price. For that model to work for you, you have to add scale.
We see this appeal and I think it comes largely from, we're so close to SaaS companies, and we look at SaaS companies and we look at how they price and package and bundle on their website and we think, yes, we should do that. You should do that but you should do it for each individual client. Don't make the mistake of segmenting your audience and having three standard offerings or four standard offerings at set prices. Do that on an individual basis.
You should segment your audience on a segmentation size of one at a time, because as soon as you start to productize, you start to commodify your offering, you start to invite competition, you put price pressure on your offering you'll see your prices go down. It feels easier to sell because the conversations are less messy, you're just selling them A, B, or C, but there are all these trade-offs inherent in it. If you don't have an opportunity for serious scale, and what I mean by that is going from 10 or 15 clients to hundreds of clients. If that opportunity isn't there, then forget about it and go exactly the other way and stay fully customized and embrace the occasional opportunity to price based on value.
Touching on the first topic I brought up, value-based pricing, even though I wrote a book on it, it's not the right way to price. The biggest mistake in pricing is to think that there's one right way to price. You should be open in every new client engagement to pricing it differently. In fact, you should be putting three different prices and three different options in front of your clients. One of them might be price based on value, one might be priced based on time and materials, one might be priced on deliverables. Everything about the work that you do for your clients and therefore the proposals and therefore your prices should remain customized.
David: I think before people heard you say that, they would have guessed that they should have been moving in the other direction and you're saying, no, live with that and embrace it and take advantage of it. I'm glad you tied in the last little bit about how you need to present options, even though it's a very customized thing each time so that's important.
Blair: I also feel the same way to a certain extent about project management. The more you and I talk about this and we began to do some research, mostly you, not me on the subject of Agile and I'm interested in it because of the apparent conflict with value-based pricing. I think you know the original intent of Agile is working with agility, and I think the way you would put together different options with different prices that represent different ways of working together with the client at different risk levels, I think a firm should be in a position to be able to present different ways that you might manage the project together, instead of forcing your methodology on a client that's maybe siloed and is really not going to adapt well to your agile method.
David: I think forcing the firm to follow a specific prescribed system with every project is going to fail, and it's also not in the client's best interest either. A lot to talk about there, I think Carl probably needs to have us back to talk about that at some point. All right, so is it my turn?
Blair: It's your turn.
David: It's my turn, thank you. I saved this one for last because it's so close to my heart. The fact that digital firms like the folks here are so good at collaboration, transparency, and openness. I mean, this whole event and the Slack channel is a perfect example of that, but it's not limited to that, it's across the whole industry. In any town, you can find people who are glad to go to lunch or get a drink with who would otherwise be a competitor. I don't know if this is a feature of the way we are as people now or not. Maybe it has nothing to do with digital, maybe it's the influence of the world around us I don't know, but it's just so fantastic.
I love the fact that there aren't people here carefully taking notes and then going out and sending out emails to try and steal somebody's client, there's none of that happening. The other thing that's interesting to me that I didn't use to see too much in the past is we're not hung up on how big the firms are so much. In the past, that'd be the first thing you'd want to know is, "How big is your firm? "Three people." "Oh, okay. Nice to meet you," and then you'd go try to find somebody worth talking to. It's not that perspective at all anymore.
I think we realized that size is, in part, a choice we make based on how much we want to do versus manage, and it's not a signal a flag of failure or not or success. People just have different approaches to that, and it's all fine. I'm so proud of the fact that digital firms contrast that with ad agencies. It's like, oh, my God, it's at opposite ends of the-
Blair: If we were at an ad agency owner summit, there'd be all this measuring up between people. I grew up in that world and where business was zero-sum. It was the only way for you to win was for other people in the ad business to lose. The nature of digital and the digital economy today is like I think if people are running digital firms, and again, people of a certain age just recognize that together we can build something that's greater. You're competing against so many different things that the client might do with that budget.
Like in advertising, it's just I'm going to spend these ad dollars with your agency, or I'm going to spend it with another agency, but here, I think there's this openness to cooperation or even coopetition, where there's just an understanding that we can grow the size of the pie, rather than having to make my size bigger at the expense of yours.
David: Yes, the spirit of this place is just fantastic. It's been really fun to be here. I know you guys feel that too.
Blair: I'm going to close on this point about change management, about how digital firms embrace change faster, and it's a necessity because the technology changes. I think some of the digital firms that I know, probably the majority of you if I said, do you do today what you did five years ago? Is the language that you use to explain what you did, is that the same? Most of you, I can't see you but would say no, we do something a little bit to quite a bit different, and some of you are just entirely different new fields.
It started with a digital firm and back in the day that used to be specialized and then everything becomes digital, then you have to crawl into these niches, and these niches are, you crawl into this little crevasse, and you think it's going to be so small, and then it opens up like Narnia and you see, there's this massive world, then you need to go in search of another crevice or another niche within that world, and that's just the way it happens across all of the business. It's happening so much faster in digital than it ever has in the analog world.
Like I've got a client who's an ad agency that I used to work for many years ago under different owners, and they're effectively the same firm today than they were when I worked with them 25 years ago or whenever that was, but they know they can no longer be, but they've had a really good long run of I think it's close to a hundred years of being an ad agency, a small independent ad agency.
David: The rules of direct mail didn't change for 30 years, but Google's changing their search algorithm 186 times a year on average.
Blair: Wow. That's crazy. All right, David, this has been fun. It's really nice to-- Well, it's a little bit disconcerting to do this looking at you.
David: It is.
Blair: I'm looking forward to the next time we record when I can talk at you and not have to look at you. Thank you all very much for indulging us, and I hope you keep listening.
[applause]
Marcus: Thank you for listening to 2Bobs with David C. Baker and Blair Enns, live from the Orpheum Theater in New Orleans. Subscribe and learn more at 2Bbobs.com. That's the number two, B-O-B-S dot com.