Working With a Maverick

When it comes to qualifications for ideal clients, David doesn’t hear anyone talking about how agencies can benefit when the person across the table is someone who presses boundaries and ethically skirts the rules within their own organization.

Transcript

Blair Enns: David, have you been watching Top Gun recently?

David C. Baker: Just say what's next and then I'll answer the question. No way I'm falling for that novice stuff you're trying to pull. No, I haven't, but go ahead.

Blair: Then why is your topic selling to Tom Cruise?

David: Oh man, you're like dipping into the dad jokes early in your life.

Blair: I could be a grandfather, I'm not, but I could be a grandfather, so I'm late to the dad jokes. The topic is working with a maverick, correct me if that was his call sign, right?

David: I think so, yes.

Blair: Tom Cruise. For some reason, I cannot get working with Tom Cruise out of my head. The topic today, dear listener, is working with a maverick. What you really mean is clients who are mavericks, although I'm going to open that door to the idea of opening with team members who are mavericks. Let's set the stage for this. First, you've got some qualifying criteria that you think every firm should use when deciding whether or not this organization or person that you're speaking to would make a good client and whether you should take them on as a client.

Let's go through this part maybe a little bit quickly. You want to go down the list of what you see as the appropriate qualifying criteria for deciding who you want to work with?

David: Yes. I think the reason why I even thought about including client criteria is because if it's true, and, of course, the jury's out on this because we haven't talked through it, but if it's true that you're better off if the person on the other side of the table, the client, is somewhat of a maverick, well, then it ought to be a part of the new business process. We ought to use that criteria to help think about it. Just off the top of my head, I acknowledge here that I might be missing some things, but these are what I would normally look for in a client relationship if I were in your shoes.

Left out of here is the specialization part. In other words, it should just go without saying that they're willing to work with you and likely pay a premium because you have more experience in whatever it is they need than somebody else. Okay. Given all that, these are the things that I think ought to be on the list. You ought to have access to the decision maker. Don't need to explain that one anymore. Need to be an experienced buyer. Quite a few people disagree with me on this one.

The company itself could be a startup that's never purchased services from a firm like yours. That's fine, but the decision maker needs to have done it. You don't usually want to be that first person. That's second, experienced buyer. There's some reason to act now. Frankly, this one just escaped me for years until you talked about it multiple times in multiple settings. There needs to be some sort of deadline pressure. If this doesn't get solved, something bad's going to happen to somebody.

Fourth, funds have been earmarked. This is also something I'm borrowing from you. In the best of worlds, you would know exactly how much that is. Even if they won't tell you, they have set that money aside. This next one, the fifth one, a lot of people disagree with me on this, too. I think the decision maker shouldn't be spending personal money. It shouldn't be their own money. They should have budget authority over either money set aside or somebody else's money or startup or whatever it is. Because if it's their own money, then they spend it too cheaply.

Sixth, they'll let you influence the strategy first. They're not just hiring a pair of hands. That may not happen right out of the gate, but eventually they will with every part of the relationship. Next is if everything goes right, is this big enough for your firm? That's usually defined as about 4% of your fee billings. If any single client can't get to that point eventually, probably not worth working with them. Then finally, eight, on the client side, whoever that person is you're going to be working with, the decision maker on that side, are they a maverick? That was the last point I put in there. I'll tell you where this comes from if I can just keep jawing here.

Blair: It's not Top Gun.

David: Yes.

Blair: Where you're walking around reading your iPhone.

David: Walking my dog. I don't know what got me on this, but I was thinking back through my best relationships with corporate America. That's in my consulting career and then in my agency career before that. There were four that came to mind. I realized that there was a maverick on the other side of the table in every case. That's what got me to really thinking about this. By thinking about it, I mean just writing about it. I didn't do any research on it. I just thought, "Ah, let's talk about this."

Blair: Let's set aside maverick for a second before we go deep into that. Your list of eight qualifying criteria, and as you've said, you've left out the obvious, the client's need. There's a fit between need and expertise. Some of these are fairly conventional, but three of them are unconventional, including the one we're going to dive deeper into. The first unconventional one you mentioned is experienced buyer. I had never heard that before I first heard it from you many years ago now. I see the brilliance of it. I think, unfortunately, some businesses are positioned around helping organizations where it's likely that the person might be an inexperienced buyer.

I think your point is that it's a lot harder when you have to educate this buyer. You have to educate them about the value of the investment. You're working with them in their role for the first time. The second non-conventional one is this idea of non-personal money. To me, where that shows up most often and most profoundly is with creative firms that work with professional firms. You get professional firms of a smaller size where you might have a few of the partners, the advisors or practitioners, whatever it is that they do that are on the marketing committee and they're all spending their money.

Anybody who has focused on working with professional firms knows that there's a threshold above that where once they start allocating budgets and hiring somebody to spend the budget, they become a lot easier to work with because you're convincing the marketing person, not the owners to part with money because the owners have already parted the money. They funded the function. I see that a lot. I think that's a really profound insight. I hadn't thought about it before you mentioned it the first time, but now I see it everywhere. It's far easier to deal with somebody who does not have to reach into their pocket to spend the money that you're talking about.

David: Yes. Restaurant owners are another group in that category too.

Blair: Oh yes. That makes sense.

David: What was the third one? That was the first two. Then what was the third?

Blair: Maverick.

David: Got it. I thought you were going to surprise me with another one here.

Blair: No, no. Let's go into maverick. If a maverick is not Tom Cruise, what is a maverick? How do you define a maverick?

David: Yes. It's really all about their personality. It has nothing to do with gender. It doesn't have anything to do with how long they've been in the field.

Blair: It's not age?

David: No, not age. It does have something to do with how long they've been at that company, but not in the field.

Blair: Because they don't last.

David: That's right. In fact, when I was thinking back to my experience of working with various mavericks, I remember how quickly I got fired when my maverick lost his job too. It's like, "Oh yes, the connections." I don't have a connection with the larger department as much as I do this one person.

Blair: Can I just point out that in your own personal experience, it may be that you were hired by mavericks that you're talking about the corporate America world and your business was never set up to serve that world. Every once in a while, somebody would reach out to you and say, "Hey, what you do for creative firms, can you do that for a department of a fortune 1,000 company?"

It's going to have to be a maverick who says, "You know what? This isn't what my colleagues or peers would look for. I see you and I see the connection and I see the different perspective that you're willing to bring to the situation. I'm willing to spend some personal capital to bring in the weirdo." Don't you think that describes your situation those four times?

David: I think it described my situation almost every time. The other people, the not for people, were more in love with the idea of having their corporation act entrepreneurially than making the tough choices to actually make that happen. I think they all wanted the same thing, but four of them really wanted it.

Blair: Do you have a name for that pseudo maverick who wants to be a maverick, but isn't really? Is it goose?

David: Oh, man, I've just thought of several that I can't share. No. The answer is no. It's definitely isn't just a reflection of my personality, even though I think I consider it more because of my personality, because I've talked about this with almost every one of my clients, and they all acknowledge that maverick thing is different. Like you asked before I went on and on, what is a maverick? A maverick presses the boundaries and skirts the rules a little bit, but not just because they're different or rebellious. I think that's part of something we really have to understand, because some people are really just assholes, but they think of themselves as mavericks. Then with a twinkle in their eye, it's like, "No, you're not a maverick. You're just an asshole."

Blair: They'd call themselves a contrarian. It's easy to be a contrarian. You just say no to everything.

David: Right.

Blair: You just disagree with everybody and everything. That just makes you an asshole. It doesn't make you smarter. It doesn't make you more of a critical thinker.

David: Right. They look at rules. They don't think rules are bad. They just think that rules apply most of the time. What's more important to them is to get things done, and if it can be done within the rules, that's fantastic. If it can't be, then the rules are just suggestions. Whereas the rest of this person's coworkers, really, the rules are how they play the game. They're not going to be promoted to the next level unless they are cooperative/rule followers. These are people who are more interested in getting things done than they are in following the rules. I think that's the simplest, shortest explanation for who they are.

Blair: Yes. They have some exposure to risk because of that, right?

Speaker 2 They do. To them, the risk takes many forms. The risk is getting in trouble for not following the rules. Another risk for them is not getting things done. That's just who they are. They're not better people or anything. There's about a fourth of the world that is this way. They see that things could be better, and they believe that they could improve them. Every once in a while, quite a bit maybe, there's some personal ego and ambition wrapped up in this. That's not primarily what's happening here. They see that something could be better, and they believe they could improve it. That's part A and B, and about a fourth of the world believe that.

This isn't always true, but I think for most of you, you see things differently, those of you listening to this. You would be better suited to work with somebody that is willing to trust you and shake things up. At its core, advertising is about skating against things. It's about seeing things differently. That's why there's a connection here between what you do and who you work best with, I think.

Blair: How are the mavericks viewed by their peers?

David: Oh, I think publicly, the peers are sort of, "Can you believe what they did?"

Blair: "Did you see what Charlie just did?"

David: Yes. Roll your eyes, and it's like, "Yes, saw that last week. I knew it was going to happen."

Blair: "Did you see that Slack post this morning?"

David: Yes. That's the public reaction. I think some of them have a different reaction too, and they're like, "Oh shit, man, Charlie's right. I've been thinking that same thing. I didn't really want to rock the boat, but I'm glad he said that. I'm going to watch and see how other people react, and then I will react too."

Blair: I swear to God, a Tom Cruise reference just came up in the scene in Jerry Maguire, where he writes this manifesto and sends it to everybody in the organization, and it's basically "fewer clients, less money." I think that's it. It might be "fewer clients, more money." Then he walks in the next day, and everybody's clapping, like, "Yes, way to go, you maverick." Quietly, they're saying, "He's fucked, he's gone." Then, I forget if he gets fired or he's forced to quit, and only one person goes with him. "Who's coming with me?" Renee Zellweger, however you say her name, is the only one who goes with him. This really is about Tom Cruise.

David: Sort of the flip side, right? Because in that example, everybody was cheering, and what I think is more likely is everybody is like, "Oh, that wasn't very good." Then they're sort of secretly clapping.

Blair: No, but to his face, they're cheering.

David: Oh, okay, got it.

Blair: Then under their breath, to each other, they're saying, "Oh, oh, he's done. He stuck his neck up too high."

David: Yes.

Blair: Yes, so that's how they're viewed. There's some admiration, and some people are inspired and follow. Some people resent, a lot of like clucking under their breath.

David: That raises the question, why aren't these people fired? If they're in the minority, and they're clearly violating the rules, it's like, well, it's because they do get things done. I think there's this reluctance that sets in, like, "Yes, I guess we need to keep her. That irritated me, and she really gets mixed reviews regularly. Doggone it, where would that department be without her?" That's sort of the kind of person that you want on your side.

You have to have somebody on the inside fighting for you, and not just managing that relationship. They need to be fighting for you. They also need to be fighting for the company. They say things that are unexpected and strong on both sides of it. That's part of who this person is. It's not that they aren't wrong. It's just that you're never unsure where you stand, and you want that person fighting for good concepts on your behalf too.

Blair: Yes, and you know, this maverick client who's like your interface with the client organization, you know they're going to run interference for you. They're pushing you maybe for a more riskier creative idea, and you're thinking, "These people will never buy it." They say, "Leave that to me. I'll sell this, and I'll spend my political capital to go make something happen."

David: Yes.

Blair: I can think of clients like that, and they're a breath of fresh air. I don't know if we've done an episode on this or not. I think perhaps we have, but I've certainly written about it. I've done some thinking in the last few years about what are the hallmarks of our most successful client relationships. It's not like I've measured this scientifically, but the pattern is pretty clear after reviewing it. Number one, internal champion. An internal champion who's fighting for this win without pitching away, because you don't just train a bunch of people and go away and have everybody change their behavior. You need somebody pushing, holding people accountable.

Almost universally, those internal champions are at the ownership level of the organization, so they have a lot of status and power from the position that they hold. More likely, it's just that maverick personality. Maybe part of being a maverick is they want the results, they're willing to push in the places that other people might not push.

David: Hey, I've got a question for you as this relates to new business, because we're hoping that we can identify a maverick sooner rather than later. Is there a pretty direct overlap between somebody being a maverick and somebody allowing you to use your phrase, derail the pitch? Does it take a maverick on that side to make that happen?

Blair: Yes, I think that's a good question. It would definitely take somebody with some confidence and a feeling of either having political capital or a willingness to spend that political capital. I wouldn't universally describe everybody who would allow you to push back on and derail a pitch. I wouldn't universally describe all of those people as mavericks, but mavericks make good clients for that. Just think about it. As you pointed out, they're aware of the rules. They just don't feel bound by them.

I can think of hundreds of client scenarios, not just mine, but our prospective clients where they're reporting back to us on the sale where the client says, "Well, it's a matter of policy. I've got to get three bids," or, "I've got to do this way," or, "We can't do that because of policy." Mavericks don't give a shit about policy. It's not like they're out there to openly violate policy. Almost every policy has a way of being bent or circumvented or broken or ignored or jumped over by jumping over rungs in the chain of command. Mavericks are willing to do that if they think that the outcome is worth it. Yes, I think there's a correlation there for sure.

David: Yes.

Blair: Okay, let's dig in a little bit more to the idea of working with a maverick. You've got here, first, you have to recognize them. You have to see that these people are mavericks. You even point out that they're not always completely compliant with procurement, which I love. Any procurement people are cringing when they listen to this. You've got two really important things. I think these are profoundly important. Once you're hired, how do you work with these mavericks? What are these important things?

David: The first is you've got to keep pressing the envelope. We've been picturing getting the client, the happy side, right? In our minds, neither one of us have visualized losing the client. When you lose the client, it's often because you've slowly quit pressing the envelope. You're taking directions more. You're taking this relationship for granted. Some eager outside firm wants to take your place. They're willing to press the envelope because you've let it slide. Don't make the mistake of having a maverick use his or her political capital on your behalf and then quit questioning them.

You want to do fantastic work. This maverick is a straight shooter. You need to be straight shooters. You need to press the envelope. If a maverick just wanted to hire somebody that would just do what they were told, they wouldn't have hired you in the first place. They feel like there's some sort of fit. That's the first one, is keep pressing the envelope and don't just take things the way they are. Keep thinking of things that even he or she is not thinking of. That's the first.

Blair: The danger is that you get hired by the maverick and then you become part of the establishment and you quit coming to the maverick with maverick solutions, with outside the box ideas. You quit pushing them. You quit being a partner in the innovative thinking and thinking about the business and the problem and the solutions differently, and you're just delivering what you always deliver. Now, the maverick move is to replace you and go find somebody who's more in line with their maverick tendencies.

David: Yes, right. The second one is don't embarrass them, man. This is somebody who has used capital on your behalf. You have gone to war together. You need to repay that by not embarrassing them. I'm thinking of things that you would just expect, not unusual things like being late or forcing this person to go back to finance and ask for more money because of some bad scope creep that you didn't communicate clearly at.

The biggest thing would be bad politics. Just listening or processing incorrectly or not notifying somebody or notifying somebody else that shouldn't have been. Just thinking from this person's perspective, still acting ethically but shaping your behavior in a way that stays within your ethical bounds but helps the maverick. Your relationship with this maverick is more important than your relationship with this company, and if that isn't the case, then something else is wrong. Usually, it's some client concentration challenge, but you're going to follow people from job to job.

Once you're done with this company, you might get discovered by a different division or something, that's pretty unlikely. Now, you're likely going to be going with this maverick to at least one, often two more, so a total of three. Don't embarrass them. They've spent capital on your behalf. Reward that appropriately.

Blair: Keep pressing the envelope. Keep bringing in the new and innovative ideas. Keep pushing their own assumptions, and then second point is don't embarrass them. Don't put them in awkward positions, and then I guess a third follow-on point is if you avoid those two mistakes, once they do get fired or move on of their own volition, if you haven't violated those two rules that we just talked about, ceasing to press the envelope or embarrassing them, then you're likely to go with them to the next job.

David: Right, yes.

Blair: Your headline is companies are really about people and you can think about your business as selling to, and most of us do this, we define our market, those whom we help and we tend to do it through demographics, but psychographics, the psychographics of the client, the individual client, the people who would be buying from you, those are important too and that's what you're talking about here. This maverick idea is that we're a psychographic, certainly not a demographic.

David: Yes, exactly right. A big thank you to Michael, Denise, Tom, Joe. Those were the four mavericks over all these years that I just learned so much from.

Blair: I also learned a lot personally because they had to have above average skills for managing conflict and a political sensibility about how to say things. I learned a lot from just watching them navigate one rule broken after another or moving ahead without the usual approvals which usually meant that somebody felt left out. How they managed that was masterful too and those are the four people that I learned a lot from. Michael, Denise, Tom and Joe. They know who they are.

David: Nice shout out, and I think the listener could probably conjure up in their minds some of their best maverick clients and they can start to see a pattern and maybe start thinking about adding to your qualifying criteria, this idea that you're looking for people with certain attributes beyond the companies or organizations you seek to serve. Who are the individuals that you most want to work with?

Blair: Maybe there's a thought leadership post. Maybe there's some qualifying criteria that you start to weave into your qualifying conversations. Thanks for this, David.

David: Yes, thank you, Blair.