42:1 Agencies and the holiday season

Lee Jackson:
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Trailblazer FM Season 42. Celebrate this holiday season with agency owners from around the world, who share how they enjoy some time off, care for their team, and look after their clients. Hear some ghosts from Christmas past and learn valuable lessons so that you don’t have to experience them. And now for your host, me.

Lee Jackson:
Folks, it’s so good to be back with you on this podcast. It’s been a few weeks and I’ve had a really good break. After five to six years, you can imagine how it exhausting. It’s been with a constant content cycle. So changing this podcast into a seasonal show has been something that’s really added some value to my work-life balance, but also my ability to give to this podcast. You may have noticed that we’ve gone through a rename and a rebrand, and a big shout out to Design Box for helping us get over the line with that. Over the next few episodes, we’re going to be looking at the holiday season for agencies around the world. And if you don’t celebrate Christmas, do not despair. The focus here is any holiday throughout the year. How can you give your team the best chance at some good quality time off? How can you look after your clients whilst you’re away or perhaps whilst your office is closed?

Lee Jackson:
We’re interviewing agency owners from around the world, asking them those important questions. How do they celebrate the holiday season? Do they give gifts to their team or their clients? Do they have any of those ghosts of Christmas past to share that we can learn from? How do they manage support during the holidays? How do they wind down before a break? And finally, we celebrate in episode 7, together, this holiday season, with words of wisdom and messages to take you into 2022. If you haven’t subscribed to this show, can I encourage you to tap that subscribe button? This episode, we’re looking at how agencies take time off and celebrate the holiday season. For myself, I know how important it is to take time with family, where I’m not being interrupted by the stresses, the worries, and the demands of the workplace. Where I can be so present and, hey, surprise, surprise, it seems many of you have the exact same feelings.

Nicole Osborne:
For me, the best way to celebrate is to actually to make sure that everyone gets time off to spend their families, or to just chill out. Personally, [inaudible 00:04:13], book off time, and I’m also very encouraging with people who are freelancers working for me that they make sure they book off time as well. And when we can, we have some virtual get togethers. So I’m going to have a Wunderbar in November, end of November, where we already start celebrating Christmas, where I will be inviting clients, but also some of my suppliers because Christmas and the holiday seasons to me is about being sociable as well.

Lee Jackson:
That was the voice of a Nicole Osborne from Wunderstars. She’s someone I know who highly treasures time with family own friends. In fact, she recently made time to hang out with Imogen and myself in a central location here in the UK. And we had such a wonderful time, sharing stories, sharing memories, and importantly, making new memories together outside of the day to day of work.

Lee Jackson:
Emily from GoWP had this to share.

Emily Hunkler:
Yeah, so celebrating the holiday season here at GoWP is a little different, I guess, because we are a global team. So we have team members all over the world, in different regions and different countries, different continents, everything. And there’s obviously folks who maybe don’t celebrate Christmas, celebrate different holidays. And we’re sensitive to that, and we to basically celebrate year round. So if you’re a member of our community, you know that we always like to celebrate wins and things like that. So we do, we make it known that as a member of the GoWP team, if you have something to celebrate, if there’s a holiday or something like that, take the time, do it, take what you need, and spend the time with your family and make it special. And that’s true around the traditional holiday season as well.

Emily Hunkler:
The other aspect of it is that we are a 24/7 service. So our maintenance and content edits services are 24/7. So we do need people available 24/7, 365 days a year. And our service exists so that agencies can take time off around the holidays and not stress and not worry. And we’re happy to do that. And luckily, we have a lot of really great agencies, and our agency partners have a lot of really great clients that typically aren’t too demanding over the holidays. So it works out pretty well, traditionally, that the support queue’s pretty slow, not high demand, and everyone on our team is able to work out ways that they can take time off, spend time with family, celebrate however they want, and that’s what we’ve relied on in the past. If a time comes where that’s no longer true, we will reassess. But right now, and for past years, it’s been pretty good, pretty good for the GoWP team.

Emily Hunkler:
And then other ways that we do it is, we try, even though we’re global and we’re remote, we try to get to together if possible. So this year, a couple of us will be in the Barcelona area during the holidays. And we have some team members there, so we’re going to do a holiday lunch with the team members that are there. So that’ll be really great to see each other in person, and celebrate, celebrate the holidays together for a nice lunch, and do something like that. So when we have the opportunities and when opportunities present themselves, we love to seize them. But anyone who has a remote team and all around the world knows it’s complicated. So we try and make sure that that spirit is around all year.

Lee Jackson:
The past year or so has had a significant impact on how agencies celebrate the holiday season. Here’s Tom Amos from Design Box.

Tom Amos:
We like to do a work do, albeit outside of COVID restrictions. So normally we will go out to a local restaurant. This year, we’re going to one of our clients. They’ve got a golf club and we’re going to have an all you can drink night. So you can imagine, it’ll be a little bit messy. But it’ll be good just to wind down and all let our hair down at the end of the year, before we break up for Christmas.

Lee Jackson:
As a bald man, I find that’s slightly offensive.

Lee Jackson:
COVID has really brought people together and changed the way people celebrate Christmas. We just heard there from Tom that they’re spending time at a client, they’re in an open air environment, et cetera. Equally, let’s hear now from Michael MacGinty who shares their plans for this year.

Michael MacGinty:
Most of December is spent getting ready for the 23rd or the 22nd, whichever day we’re closing. We help out a few local charities with some pro bono work that just makes us feel good. But what we’re actually doing this year is, we’ve organised a networking event, and it’s in a local hotel. We hope to have a few hundred people, and we’re getting all the local charities who are involved in doing anything in our community at Christmastime to come to this hotel. We’ve got a room rented, there will be soup and mince pies, and coffee and bread, whatever. So it costs nothing to attend, but we’re trying to get the business people to come in, to make them aware of which charities are in our locality because I think most people don’t really realise which charities are in their town, nevermind what they do, or how much effort they put in.

Michael MacGinty:
So the benefit to the charities should be that they should create awareness, hopefully get some volunteers, maybe get some donations, but if nothing else, create awareness of what they do in the community. So that’s our thing for this Christmas. So I’m looking forward to that, that’s on the 15th of December.

Lee Jackson:
As many of us now work from home, there are different challenges for getting together. Ali Green here shares their challenges and their experiences at GreenMellen Agency.

Ali Green:
It’s been a little different every year. I think we try something different and see how it sticks, see if it sticks. And then the next year we say, “That was fun, so we’ll try that again.” But really, historically, we’ve always tried to do some event with the team. So our team’s local or has been, historically, we’ve all been local to the area. So we can all get together and do something like go to the botanical gardens to see the lights, and go to dinner afterward. We’ve done things like escape rooms together, where we all try to get together and do some team building things.

Lee Jackson:
My idea of hell.

Ali Green:
Not good for claustrophobic people.

Lee Jackson:
No, no, no.

Ali Green:
But the pandemic threw us off a little bit and then suddenly we weren’t getting together, and we all just looked at each other on camera, and said, “Well, what are we going to do now?” So I want to say we missed last year, celebrating, really, and doing anything exciting. And then this year, we now have some remote distributed team members. So here we are again, looking at each other saying, “Well, how do we do something with everybody?” So I can’t wait to listen to all of the other answers to see what people are doing on distributed teams. But, I mean, the botanical garden lights were as a team was one of my most memorable celebrations with our team. We’re doing an escape room again this year, but our distributed team can’t join so we’re sad. We’re going to miss two of [inaudible 00:11:58].

Lee Jackson:
When I was chatting with Travis on this very subject, I was encouraged as he shared the simplicity of what they do, and build an amazing experience around play, food and togetherness.

Travis:
When the world isn’t being scorched by the coronavirus, we usually have a Thanksgiving potluck.

Lee Jackson:
Yeah.

Travis:
Everyone brings in their own dishes. I cook a small turkey, nothing fancy, and then we just eat and drink and hang out. We do hook up a Nintendo Switch on the conference room TV.

Lee Jackson:
Oh [inaudible 00:12:31].

Travis:
And we do a bit of Mario Kart.

Lee Jackson:
That’s awesome, who’s the champion supreme?

Travis:
Oh, one of my lead developers knows all the shortcuts, and yeah, can just skip along ahead of everybody.

Lee Jackson:
Oh no, they don’t know how to do a speed run do they? Because isn’t there a speed run you can do in eight seconds or something?

Travis:
Yes, they know the speed runs and they have that Mario speed run game so they play that all the time.

Lee Jackson:
So it’s fun and games at your agency and lots of food?

Travis:
Yeah. Definitely, hanging out time. Yep, lots of food.

Lee Jackson:
Perhaps you don’t have an agency team or you with contractors around the world. We hear next from Chantal, who runs 1 Day Webs. She was with us a few years ago and shared her process, so we’ll make sure we link to that particular episode. But after a year of high pressure builds, what does Chantal do?

Chantal Edouard-Betsy:
So for me, it’s all about taking time off. I don’t generally take a lot of time off during the year, and I normally am incredibly pressurised because I’m doing these fast builds and they’re one after the other. So when it comes to the end of the year and the holiday season, for me, I close the shop, mid-December to at Jan, and I take a full month off. And being in the Southern hemisphere, we have summer in the holiday season. So for me, it’s all about lying in the pool, on the lilo, reading my Kindle, playing with Charlotte, splashing around, chilling, and that’s about the beginning and the end of my Christmas season.

Lee Jackson:
I’m sure all of us can resonate there with the idea of relaxation, chilling out, family time. In episode 6 of this Christmas season, agency owners will be sharing how they wind down before the holidays so they can really enjoy some quality time off. So if you are not subscribed to this podcast, can I recommend right now, hit pause and hit subscribe.

Lee Jackson:
As our agency grows, Tim and I have had to work out new ways of celebrating the holiday season with our team. What started off as a couple of guys here in the UK has grown to representatives in the US and in India. What we do here with the UK team is we all get together for a meal. Food is ridiculously important, and that’s usually at a restaurant. Even this year, with COVID restrictions, we’re still making that happen where we’re getting together at a restaurant in a COVID safe environment, and enjoying time together, and of course, food. Tim does have a dream of getting a barbecue together and having all of us in his garden from everywhere in the world. So that would be phenomenal. And perhaps one day we will really make that happen.

Lee Jackson:
What we then do is provide a budget to the distributed teams so that can arrange their own outing. Therefore, our folks in Vellore will take their family and they’ll go out to a restaurant together. And likewise, the same over in Chicago. Whatever your plans are this year, I do hope that you get to have some wonderful quality time off to relax, reset, restore, and hit 2022 with fresh energy and excitement. In the next episode, our agency owners share what sort of gifts they give to their team. So if you are looking for ideas on how to bless and encourage your team members, then tune in to the next episode.I would love to give a massive shout out to this season’s sponsor, which is Cloudways. You can find out more over on trailblazer.fm/cloudways. They are a phenomenal cloud hosting provider, who power all of our most important projects over at Event Engine. So really proud to recommend Cloudways.

Lee Jackson:
So are you getting excited for Christmas? If you don’t celebrate Christmas, have you had value from this in order to work out ways you can celebrate any season together as a team? Let us know. Head on over to trailblazer.fm, link is in the show notes, and let us know in the comments. We’ll see you in the next episode.