Speaker: Kerrie Luginbill, Chief Strategy Officer, OTM
What was the main challenge you needed to overcome with Vecteris?
Kerrie Luginbill: There were two main challenges we were looking to overcome with our work with Vecteris. One, was that for a number of years, we had been doing all of our service based work, completely customized. A client would come in, they would have a problem and we would completely customize a solution to them. That was resulting in the leadership team having to be really, really involved in every single project that we were working on. And it made it really hard to train new team members. The second challenge we had was we needed to find a way to make our services more profitable. And that's really hard to do when you are selling time and materials and you're not really sure how you're going to solve every single problem that you're working on. So what we were really looking for was a way to make the things that we do, consistent, repeatable and teachable to other people so that we didn't have to bring the leadership team in on every single project that we had. And we could start to look at ways to make certain steps in the process, more efficient or more profitable.
Could you describe how the Vecteris Productize Pathway® helped your business, including any metrics that come to mind?
Kerrie Luginbill: The Productize Pathway® and boot camp was really instrumental in changing the way that I think about productization and service delivery. And I think it stems from, I'm a creative and I'm a really strategic thinker and I was afraid of productization for a long time because I thought that it would take the magic away from me. I thought it would make it so that we were a factory and that we weren't being creative. And that's not the case at all. And that was the biggest takeaway that I had is that I had to change my viewpoint on what it meant to productize. Productization is a spectrum. And I thought that if you weren't customized, you were scale, you know, completely out of the box delivering the same thing. And that's not really the case. There's space in the middle where you can create bumpers and frameworks so that you have consistent delivery, that's efficient and effective and building margin into your projects, where you also still have the ability to be flexible and creative. And so that mindset shift really teed up our agency to embrace productization more and it resulted in us creating what we call our system of refinement. And we take non-profitable services or services where we do not have a a specific process and we're doing everything customized and we run it through a series of exercises and mapping and things that I learned through the boot camp. And we go through that process for all of these services and we've been able to actually take some of our least profitable, our most unprofitable services and make them some of our most profitable services. And I can't recall all of the data off the top of my head. But one of them was how we delivered social media marketing and we were actually losing money every time we created social media calendars for clients. And today it's one of our profitable service lines. And so that in itself was incredibly rewarding. But the tools that our team has now and our mindset on how we can create repeatable, consistent, efficient processes to deliver work is something that was invaluable to our ability to scale, to build profit margin and to be able to grow and be the type of agency that we want to be.
What has been the most significant impact of working with Vecteris?
Kerrie Luginbill: One of the areas that my team really struggled with myself included was prioritization along this productize journey. We needed to fix so much or change so much that it was really hard to identify where to start or what to do to even get started. As a full-service marketing agency, you can imagine we have a lot of different services. There's social media and there's digital advertising and there's PR and there's graphic design and website design. All of these different services that all kind of needed to be looked at and revamped and through the productize boot camp, I was able to really figure out what steps to take, in what order, and then learn how to prioritize for greatest impact. Something we had never really done before was analyze the impact of each service before prioritizing which services to work on. We would just pick whichever one hurt the most, but that might not have been the service that our clients really valued the most. And so something Vecteris taught me was to look at what our customers care about and start there and make sure that the problem we're solving was urgent and expensive. And now whenever we decide we want to create a new service or we want to refine a service that we already offer, we look at how urgent and expensive that problem is. And if it's not, it goes to the bottom of the list or doesn't even make the list at all. And that is a process that we had never had in place before. And something that I think allowed us and freed us up mentally and from a resource perspective to focus on the things that really mattered.
