Orbiting the Giant Hairball

For the last time—ever—David and Blair discuss client-side marketing departments, their struggle to be entrepreneurial and what we can learn from them.

Links

Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace by Gordon MacKenzie

Transcript

Blair Enns: David, you have client-side departments on the brain, because I think we just talked about client-side departments. Not too long ago.

David C. Baker: I knew you were going to say something about that. Oh, God.

Blair: Why are we revisiting this topic? Do you care about these people? Are they really human?

David: They are human. I don't care too much about them. I feel like this is the last one I've got in me, but it is a really good one so I've got it to get it out and then move on to something else but what is it about this? I'm just obsessed with this. I'm obsessed with them because not because I do a lot of work with them anymore, like I used to, but because our clients, there are probably some listeners who run in-house departments, but mainly our clients are working with him every day. I'm just obsessed about understanding them and I've got one good one in here and then I promise it's going to be a long time before we talk about them again.

Blair: Okay. You sent me a bunch of notes and you opened with "I'm reluctantly working with a few in-house departments. Again, I left because I hated them."

David: You weren't supposed to read that.

Blair: I'm back, but only if they want to read it, it'd be entrepreneurial. Before I read that, I was thinking about my own experience with working with in-house marketing departments, and that is zero. Over the years, a bunch of people, I think you've been in there too have said, "Hey, you should really think about working with the in-house departments." I'm thinking, well, I teach new business. I don't see how it's practical.

Then also, I couldn't get excited about that group and this isn't a right or wrong thing. It's just me personally, my motivation. I really like working with the entrepreneur, the creative entrepreneur, the business owner who has authority, who can make decisions, who is beholden to no one, really. I just tried on working with in-house departments and I thought it's just a completely different beast.

They're so hemmed in, in so many ways so that was just me doing my own analysis of like, why am I not interested in working with this group? As you point out whether you or I are working with them or not our clients, our listeners, it's in their interest to better understand these departments, what makes them tick, et cetera. Is that right? Is that where we're going here?

David: Exactly, and I had the same experience. I was working with them. Oh, for probably four years just with the marketing department, so I did lots of work for Hallmark and Toyota and Pricewaterhouse, Coopers, TIAA-CREF. There were about 30, I think. Then how I'm going to say so many things I should not say.

Blair: Go on.

David: You love it. You love hanging me out to dry here, but I remember it would typically be a three-day engagement and after every day, I remember taking the elevator down and walking out on the first floor to get to my car and shaking my head and giving myself a dope slap and saying, "How in the world did we become the most powerful economic country on the planet with these boobs running this place."

[laughter]

Blair: It's official. You will never work within house departments again.

David: All right. Probably not. That ends my career. They just didn't take advice. I stepped back and realized, "Oh, my goodness, the direction is completely different." I'm trying to make them more entrepreneurial and they don't want to be entrepreneurial, but if they wanted to be entrepreneurial, this is what it would look like and that's the topic of today, is how do you look at in-house departments through an entrepreneurial lens? What would it mean if they wanted to be entrepreneurial I'm working with one right now and getting ready to work with another one.

I still see this, and of course, I touch base with my clients all the time about how this is happening. This is one of those little conversations where I don't even know how valuable it is, but I think some lights are going to come on. When people hear how you look at an in-house department through an entrepreneurial lens and what might change. Actually, I think a lot of listeners will be in a position to share some of this with their clients and their clients will probably be pretty, I would think grateful for it. Maybe not all of them, but some of them.

Blair: Just skip over the part where we trashed them at the beginning. Hey, you said you worked for Hallmark because that's a creative company. It reminds me of Gordon MacKenzie's book who worked for Hallmark his whole career, I think.

David: Orbiting the Giant Hairball, that one?

Blair: Yes, Orbiting the Giant Hairball. The subtitle is A Corporate Fool's Guide to surviving blah, blah, blah, with grace. It's one of my favorite all-time books on creativity. Dear listener, if you haven't read it. Oh, man. It's worth reading for the way the book was designed to. It's a beautifully designed book. There's a lot of marginalia, there's a lot of like writing and doodling in the margins.

David: That book was designed by a client of mine in Kansas City. It is a beautiful book too. Not just the message.

Blair: He's no longer with us. I think he died like over a decade ago. The title of the book speaks to what we're talking about here. He says, orbiting the giant hairball. He said, you, as the individual working in a corporation, you are a hair and your job is to orbit the hairball without getting sucked into it. Be this creative individual and don't get sucked into the bureaucracy.

Here's a creative guy working in a creative company and he's doing all he can to resist being sucked into the machine and neutered. It's a fantastic guide to working in a big corporation. If the listener is thinking of sharing this episode with their in-house clients, maybe also want to send them that book for Christmas.

David: Let me just do a call out here to somebody that's been very influential to me in this as well. His name is Michael Roberts and he has been the head of in-house marketing. He's got various titles, pretty lofty titles. I first met him. He worked at Citi and then he worked at TIAA-CREF. That's where I met him and worked for him.

I was so impressed with how he wanted to bring entrepreneurial principles and apply them usefully and helpfully in the corporate environment. He went on to Bank of America. Now he's at Vanguard. I just want to acknowledge that I've learned a lot from Michael Roberts. Good guy.

Blair: I'm sure these people who bring you in they're caught in this entrepreneurial or entrepreneurial tension, they're limited in many of the things that they can do and they aspire to be more entrepreneurial. Maybe the success that you typically look for in the work that you do with your agency, clients, their definition of success on the in-house team would be different.

David: It would be different.

Blair: A lower expectation.

David: That's right.

Blair: You typically, I imagine show up thinking you're going to effect big change in your typical client relationship and those clients who are agencies, you're dealing with the owner of the firm, they have the ability to make these changes and the person running the in-house department does not have that ability.

David: Some of them, the best ones are really Mavericks. There's probably a better word for it, but I liked the word Maverick and that they do their job well, but they take a different path. The non-Mavericks at the corporation at the Fortune 1000, they're annoyed by this Maverick because they get away with doing things and other people don't want them to get away with it, but they're successful. They're afraid to touch them.

Their success makes them a little bit out of reach from the normal hand slapping and our clients, the people listening here, they understand what it means to have a Maverick inside. Who's going to fight for the right things, make it a little bit more entrepreneurial knows when to push and when not to push. If somebody is listening to this, that wants to make changes internally, they're going to have to have sort of a Maverick mentality and I would be really happy if they just listened to this and they think a little bit differently from now on.

They find little ways to slowly turn the screws and move it around. Even though that statement I made about how in the world would we become this country and so on. That's true of other countries too. The fact is that they're very successful. My dissatisfaction with how they run things is almost immaterial because the results speak for themselves. I look at it and I think this could really be so much better. I don't know if I'm right, frankly.

Blair: Yes. You might not be right and it's really, at the end of the day, is the client getting what they want. You just basically elucidated the premise of the book, Orbiting the Giant Hairball and this idea of, how do you be a Maverick, but not so much of a Maverick that you get kind of rejected completely, you stay in orbit. You don't get sucked in. You don't get rejected. You stay in orbit. You've got a list of facts that you want our listener to understand about the in-house department. I'll just turn it over to you. What's the fact number one that people need to understand.

David: Client-side departments have a massive client concentration problem. They have one client like, well, that's not new news. It is interesting to think about that. If you were an independent private firm and you only had one client that you'd be just like them.

Blair: Yes.

David: What would that mean in your environment? What it would mean is that you're afraid to lose them so you become more of an order taker. You push back a little bit less. That's one of the results that always happens when you have a client concentration problem, you become client-driven so that the client is more in charge because they have so much power over your livelihood.

In an in-house department, they have a client concentration problem, like not news, but it's interesting to think about it that way. Just like inevitably, it would turn an entrepreneurial firm into more of an order-taker rather than a strategic thinker. The same thing tends to happen, that's where the weaker kids get thrown off the mary go round. Oh, I got some really bad stories here. It's the orbiting thing, unless you resist this, you're going to get sucked into their world and you will be taking orders from everybody internally, your one client that you can't lose. If your one client is unhappy with you, they will voice that to whoever matters, and eventually, you'll either fix your attitude or you'll be out on your butt. They have a client concentration problem. That's what sets the stage for a lot of this.

Blair: In there but for the grace of God, goes you.

David: Yes, no kidding.

Blair: You and I have worked with firms, I'm thinking of one in particular, very early in my consulting career, One Client, 95% of their billings. They brought me in to improve their new business efficacy and to try to dilute the risk that that One Client represented. I worked with them on and off for years. In the end, I said, "You know what--" The client grew so fast and demanded so much that any other client they brought in just never got any attention. Finally, my advice was "Well, just focused on this one client. Ride this rocket ship for as long as you can and understand when this goes away, you just shut it down, go do something else."

David: For your own mental health, you need to keep them at arm's length, just pretend that you're still in charge even though you're not. [chuckles]

Blair: Fact number one is recognize if they have a massive client concentration problem. If you had that client concentration problem, you would behave the same way. What's fact number two?

David: Client-side departments are typically viewed as a cost center and not a revenue center. This is one of those areas where you can tell this is an early signal that they want to be more entrepreneurial. The higher-ups who make decisions around budgeting every year, they look at this marketing department, and they think, "Wow, it's just costing more and more, what's the ROI here? What's the benefit?"

Maybe it shouldn't be viewed as a cost center but a profit center. The client I'm getting ready to work with, that's what they want to do, they want to turn it into a profit center. When you have an internal department that's a cost center, say, your IT or your accounting or whatever, what you do is you manage it for efficiency and output, not so much the degree to which it contributes to innovation or new thinking, whatever.

They're a cost center so you manage it that way, the way clients manage agencies. It's a cost center, it's not a profit center. I've never yet met more than about maybe 10 in-house departments that are viewed as profit centers, they're all viewed as a cost center. They're managed differently, they're thought of differently.

Blair: Expenses to be minimized rather than investments to be maximized.

David: Right. Yes, you got to defend every expense you have and the defense is very different. It has to be very specific. It can't be around innovation, which is often difficult to quantify.

Blair: We're talking about how a client's side departments can be more entrepreneurial and we're going over a list of facts that you, the listener running agencies, you need to recognize that these facts shaped the reality of the client department. We're at number three, client-side departments don't usually have a chargeback system. What do you mean by that?

David: There's no currency of value. I'm one of the internal clients of this in-house department and I need something, I contact them. I'm not going to get an invoice for that. I'm just going to have it done. The main result from that is that there's no way to filter stupid requests. If I'm running an independent firm and I get a request from one of my clients to do something, I'm going to reflect the difficulty or the risk of doing that in the price.

That price is going to deter some of those requests, they're going to say, "Oh, I didn't realize it costs that much. I don't see the benefit. Forget it, but thank you for talking to me about this." Internally, there's no currency, there's no value, there's nothing that serves as a filter for stupid requests. You will see, this is another signal that an in-house department wants to be more entrepreneurial.

They have an internal chargeback system. It's not really money-changing hands. They're not really getting invoices, but they agree in advance that if it's a cost center, then the whole corporate entity funds this, and then they do what they need to do. If it's a profit center, then they work with each department internally who says, "I think I'm going to need this much work from you during the year," and then they spend that carefully.

Those are the filters for stupid requests because they can't afford to waste that money, even though it's really not money. I will say that a chargeback system isn't a panacea, there are problems with the chargeback system, but the fact that there hardly is ever any chargeback system means that there's no currency to determine value on things or to push back on stupid requests. As a result, you're not sure how are you going to filter, you use money to filter work at an independent firm but here, you don't have money. How do you prioritize your focus as an in-house department? You have to rely on something else.

Sometimes it's like all right we're going to favor the departments that involve us early on and bring us in at a high level. Or we're going to favor the departments that are really good at telling us everything we need to do in advance or the ones that get us the materials that we need on deadlines. It just gets sloppy because money isn't there, money doesn't solve everything but money is a really useful filter and in-house departments don't usually have that.

Blair: In reality, you're going to favor the whims of the most senior person who has the biggest impact on your reality. I'm watching Mythic Quest on Apple TV right now. It's basically Silicon valley the show Silicon valley set in a gaming company and there's so many examples of this where the founder I think his title is creative director of him going to the in-house department with all these ludicrous requests and this lack of chargeback system. There's no filtering mechanism that says do this. Don't do this prioritize that, et cetera. You're just at the whims of these more senior people.

David: Right.

Blair: The next fact you want us to know about client-side departments. They have no choice over their clients. That's tied to this client concentration problem above but there's more to it than that is there.

David: You can always say you don't want to work for somebody and then affirm. Internally I'd like to be a fly on the wall. When you try that at an in house department is like, those people over in insurance we just don't like them. Y'all go find your own people to work with. It's like no that's not an option? Not only do you not have choice over which departments do you want to work with usually but you don't have a choice over how qualified your individual contexts are.

Many times because time is the biggest currency at these Fortune 1000s. They don't think all that highly of the internal marketing department anyway. They shoved down the relationship management of that department to somebody lower on the chain who isn't empowered to make decisions. Who's always having to re-present or resell the idea back to the decision-maker.

They don't understand how long things take. All they care about is pleasing their boss. Often, you're bearing the brunt of that especially if you keep rescuing them. If they're waiting too long or they're making too many changes in things this empowered EA or marketing coordinator or whatever, they just don't really care how to impact your life generally. In a normal world, you would just quit working for them because there isn't the respect. Now I'm not saying this is true for all of them.

I would say most of the internal contacts are really competent and fair but not always. If you look at the number of in-house contacts you have it's way more than the typical you and I talk about 10 to 15 to 20 it's way more than that. It's spread out and the quality of those contacts is quite a bit lower and it really impacts the level of work that you can do. No choice over your clients in reality really does impact how this works in their setting.

Blair: You're depressing me. [chuckles]

David: Well, we're not even done. If there are any knives near you you might want to move them right now

Blair: If you never worked in a large corporation or you haven't for a very, very long time and you've lived this either entrepreneurial lifestyle of owning the business or working in a very entrepreneurial creative business where you have all this freedom to say what you think and to push back and throw a hissy fit and to be selective about who you work with et cetera. The idea of trying this on of working in this environment some personalities are suited to it. Mine clearly is not. I suspect a lot of people listening to this they couldn't do it if their life depended on.

David: Right. In fact, they're willing to make a lot less money to not have a boss like this, but it's really partly a fit. The entrepreneur really resists those normal usual ways of working the things that almost all humans normally do. If you're working in an in-house department you're listening to this you're just smirking at this. You're thinking it's not that bad. What are you talking about? It's just a different outlook and a perspective and you're willing to work within that environment because of the other things that are really good about it. I'm not just trying to basically spit all over in-house departments but I am saying that they are very different than entrepreneurial environments and this is what it means.

Blair: Got you. I keep seeing scenes from office space. [laughter]

David: Yes, right.

Blair: Not now, Lumbergh. I'm busy playing Tetris. All right. Your next fact that you want us to understand about client-side departments is an interesting one, you say they're founded nearly always on the wrong premise. What do you mean by that?

David: This came up very early in my career because the impetus for when I was asked to work with new departments almost always came because there was some scuttlebutt about how expensive this cost center was and the cost center was very busy, they needed more people, or they needed more space, or more equipment, or whatever and they were faced with this difficult moment in time where they had to defend their existence.

They would come to me and say, "Hey, can you help prepare a document that shows that we are a good financial investment for them?" I tried it, I think I did it about seven times and none of those cases demonstrated that it was a good sound economic decision to have an in-house department. In every case that I measured, it was more expensive for them to have an in-house department and to use really good, highly paid outside independent firms, and because I was just telling them, wherever the science lead, I just didn't really care where it led.

I just wanted to be honest with them, I would tell them that but then in the same breath, I would say, but it doesn't matter. That's not why an in-house department should exist. It should exist, because it's about specialization. They know so much about this company's history and their brand and their service lines and their culture. That's why an in-house department should exist. It's the same argument that an independent firm does, it's specialization. Don't try to make an argument about how it makes sense from a financial standpoint, because it doesn't. That's what I mean by that.

Blair: As you're explaining that I'm thinking about Nike. To the best of my knowledge, Nike has really no marketing people. They have no in-house marketing people. They're thought of as a marketing firm. They're not a marketing firm, they're really a product firm. They're thought of as a marketing firm because they do marketing really well. They do marketing really well because they outsource all marketing to external agencies and to your point about essentially being the holder of institutional knowledge, the in-house department, I think Nike's worked with Wieden & Kennedy for 40 years now.

David: It's almost like their in-house department, just honestly.

Blair: Yes and I've worked in an agency relationship with a client where we were the institutional memory, we the agency, we were the consistent factor in marketing when people on the client-side turned over and over again. I'm pushing back on that point, I guess. You're saying the real reason for them to exist is expertise and the expertise is the knowledge of how things are done here?

David: If it's a Wieden & Kennedy knows a lot about that space, and know a lot about that category, that SSE code, and so on. The reason you would have an in-house department is because they know the same thing. That is the primary value of an in-house department is specialized knowledge, it's not to save the company money. If you're under a false premise, a false belief that this department, we can only justify having it because it's cheaper than using an outside agency, that's not--

For one thing, it isn't true, for another thing, it doesn't even matter, because that's not why they exist to save money. They exist to really understand the client exceedingly well, just like they would hire a Wieden & Kennedy because Wieden & Kennedy understands that space really well.

Blair: If that department was founded on that premise, then it's only a matter of time before somebody else comes along, does a cost-benefit analysis, and says, hey, wait a minute, this isn't saving us money, get rid of it.

David: Right, exactly.

Blair: What's next on our list of facts about client-side departments?

David: It's about accessibility and this isn't as big an issue but one of the ways that an in-house departments slowly becomes more and more valuable over time is this fact that they are very accessible. You just walk down the hall, you just pick up the phone, you meet somebody in the cafeteria, and over time, you start to slowly believe, even though it's not a good belief, that your value is how accessible you are. You can see how this would spill over to an independent firm, where you're on call all the time, your value is defined, in part, not in whole, but in part by the fact that you jump when they need something and an in-house department will fall into that category invariably, jumping when they need something.

The flip side of that is that they are so accessible, that they aren't listened to like an external agency would who drops in and wows the crowd and then moves out. Anybody that's as accessible as an in-house department is slowly going to lose that objectivity and the sense of an external expert that comes with it. Teamwork is defined, nobody stands up and defines it this way, but teamwork is defined in an in-house department as accessibility, accessibility is actually more valuable in an in-house department than having the right answers.

That slowly bumps you down rung by rung on that expertise ladder. Why they like you is because you're accessible rather than you have really good external objective ideas. All I'm saying here is that in-house departments, you don't want to put your foot down just to make false stands on things, but recognize that to really be valuable from an entrepreneurial standpoint, it's not so much about accessibility, it's about objective externality. You have to keep some distance with the internal client and push back, you're not just a pair of hands doing what they want, you should be advising them, and that is not about accessibility, that's about external objective thinking.

Blair: The more accessible you are, the less likely you are to advise them, you write about this in your book, The Business of Expertise, where you say, "In some parts of the world, an expert is very accessible," like in a village, anybody can come to see them. They're in the middle of the village available to anybody, but in the developed Western world, we associate expertise with distance or inaccessibility, and so you see that play out in, in-house departments,

David: Right, and when those experts need to mix with the unwashed masses, they either have an entourage or they're wearing uniforms or so that we can distinguish them as separate and more important. It's a little silly, but it's just a part of our culture.

Blair: Yes. All right, your next fact that you want us to understand about client-side departments is they don't have a new business problem, and so they don't have a marketing plan. Yes, so what are the implications of that?

David: Yes, it is because they don't want any more business for one thing. There's no benefit to adding to their workload, there's more benefit to minimizing it. Because they misunderstand new business, just like all the external, private entrepreneurial firms do, who think that new business is about getting more work, it's not, it's about the quality of the work. It's about how your prospects view you right out of the gate. It's about establishing expertise so that they listen to you for their benefit.

Well, in-house departments don't ever think that way, and if they do, I've probably only had three clients over the years where I've successfully helped them think about a new business problem. I say, quit taking your clients for granted here. Let's just pretend that they have a choice, even if they don't, and educate them, send out insight, have your own content pieces going out, hold some classes that train them, work any new employee that's going to be interfacing with you. Help them understand how to work effectively with you.

Get yourself in a new business mindset, not because you have to convince these people to use you, but because you want to set up the right sort of relationship, which is really the whole point of new business anyway.

Blair: All right, that makes sense two more facts on this list here. The next one client-side departments can't say no, without losing their teamwork badge. I love this idea. You're not in the team because you said no, do you want to unpack that.

David: Yes, when in fact, the people who say no, not just to say no, but because it really needs to be said, those are sometimes the most valuable people in an organization. We have defined teamwork as not getting in the way of the very slow progress we are making at this company.

[laughter]

Blair: Oh, man, that's perfect.

David: Who gets promoted for saying no, a lot, it just doesn't happen that much. If you're going to say, no, you better have demonstrated your value to this organization a lot. Then you have earned the right to say no, once every 17 days, and you got to keep track of it, or if you overuse your allotment, and you look around and say, oh, shoot, I don't have a chip in my bag to support that no then you're screwed. I just think that it's really hard to play this game.

In Corporate America, the way value is assigned to people is different than it is somewhere else. Being an expert at an in-house department means you have to say no, sometimes. Like, "Ah, no, that's a stupid idea." I mean, you wouldn't say it quite like that. I would say like that, somebody else wouldn't say like that. That's a stupid idea. We shouldn't do that. Well, what's the upside of doing that, and an in-house department there's very little, so it doesn't happen very often, right?

Blair: Yes, we've talked about before, if you don't say no, your yes is meaningless. Then the Warren Buffett quote of "The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no, all the time to almost everything," where you can't really do that in an in-house department. There's this tension, if you're not saying no at all, then you're going to get all this crap dumped on you. Last fact, client-signed departments have a long, long, never-ending relationship with their internal clients. Yes, so what?

David: What's the point of that? You talk about this in an external setting. I forget how you say it, but it's something like, "You'll never have more power than you do at the beginning." It's going to decline. The only variable is time. How long will it? Here we are stuck in a long because the tenure at in-house departments is longer than it is at outside independent firms. What are you going to do long?

What you do is you build these political alliances because you're bored and you figure out who's going to help you get places and accomplish things. You work with them. All of this political baggage starts to build up and because of that, you get tired and there are sides to different things and it's complex. This isn't the big issue, it's just a fact that you're not rotating cycling clients like you are independently. You don't get all that many fresh starts.

The fresh starts that come are usually when a department head moves on or there's a merger or an acquisition or something like that. It's just not as frequent. You have to keep reinventing yourself more than you would outside. You have to reinvent yourself to continue to demonstrate value. I didn't really think about talking about this, but how would I design an in-house department that was more entrepreneurial? Well, I would give the clients complete freedom to use them or not.

They could take their budget and there's money involved and they can either use the money to hire the in-house department, which has done a great job of establishing their bonafide, or they can go hire an outside firm. In other words, that in-house department is not afraid to be judged in an entrepreneurial setting, they want to earn every bit of work they do. That's how I would redesign this, but I should add that nobody's asking me to do that. This is just my pipe drain.

[laughter]

Blair: On the last fact here about never-ending relationships. I'm fond of saying that agencies, you reinvent the agency, one new client at a time. You're pointing out that the in-house department does not have the opportunity to do that. We get into these relationships, we know each other, our position in the relationship devolves over time and there is no opportunity to recycle on that so you have to look for it.

I really love your solution. I was going to ask you, "Okay, look, what do we do with all of this?" Now I know more about what it's like to be on the client-side, running or working in an in-house marketing or creative department. Now I know that I'm not qualified to do that and it's my idea of hell. Then again, that's just me. Beyond that, what do I do with it? I really love your idea. It strikes me that the idea that the in-house department should charge for their services, should be seen as a profit center and their clients should have right to use them or not use them so they get to succeed or fail on their own merits. That solves almost every issue here. Doesn't it?

David: It does. In fact, our next episode is going to be me interviewing you on how to implement value-based pricing with your in-house departments.

Blair: Oh no, it isn't. No.

David: Are you relieved that we're done with in-house departments for a while? I am.

Blair: Oh yes, totally. You know what? I'm expecting you're going to come back in a few month's time and say, "Oh, I've got another bone to pick or another thing I want to get off my chest about in-house departments." What does our listener do with this episode? They're more empathetic towards their client?

David: Yes, they send gift baskets to everybody they work with because now they understand that, oh, actually, it might be interesting to send this episode to some of their in-house departments. They might get a kick out of it. [chuckles]

Blair: They might.

David: They might not too. I'm not sure what to do with it. This is more for me. I just needed to get this off my chest today. I don't really care if it's useful.

Blair: One of the things I like about this is the idea that we're so used to competing against the in-house departments and at least in my world, we are advising firms on new business and the scenarios that I encounter are a client of ours, an agency finds out that their clients thinking of taking some of this work in-house or all of it, they're basically competing against in-house resources. We'd done an entire podcast episode on that.

To me, this just helps me be a little bit more empathetic of the in-house department situation. If we can see them as our brethren and we can find ways to alleviate some of the challenges that are implied in some of the facts that we've covered, I think we might both be better off.

David: Yes. Because many of them are really good people who are very talented, who are a little bit trapped in that system. There are some real benefits to in-house departments and so on, but there's some challenges around it. I just think only good can come from understanding what's happening on the client-side.

Blair: All right. This has been elucidating, David, thanks since our last episode ever on client-side departments until next time.

David: Thank you, Blair.

Blair: Thanks.