 First off, congratulations everyone. You made it all the way to the end session. I am absolutely shocked that you did. If you're like me, you're having a fun time here in Prague. Today we're going to talk about growing your agency by partnering with others. And real quick show of hands. Who are agency owners here? Agency owners, most of you. Agency management or involved in biz dev or somewhere in there. One in quiet place to sleep. No, okay, good. So as you know, building an agency is not easy. As a business owner, you have to wear all the hats. You get to be the janitor, the biz dev, the sales marketing developer, client relations, HR, you get to do it all, right? And this is why unfortunately 50% of businesses fail within the first five years. 70% fail within 10. So the odds are stacked against you when you're starting a business. And this isn't to scare you. And if you're new to your agency or just starting your agency, don't look at this as something that is scary. Look at this as a good challenge, right? Your milestones here are going to be year five and year 10. You can get past year five, you can get past year 10. You have a sustainable business, right? But as a new business owner, you're trying to do all the things and go out and be all the things. And knowing that sometimes those cards are stacked against you, you have this feeling of it's us versus them. It's me against the world. It's my agency against everyone else. And I'm here to tell you today that business is not a zero sum game. If you win, someone else doesn't lose. If someone else loses, you don't win. That's not how business works. And so as we start to look at this like us versus them mentality, what we really see is that businesses often reflect the community that they're in. I'll give you an example. So when I started my business back in 2009, I started it as an app agency. I had this grand idea that we were going to be building a whole bunch of apps for this new thing called the App Store that we were going to partner with a bunch of celebrities in Hollywood. Ask me about it over a beer later. It's a really fun story. But that was the original premise of our business. And so I was in the Apple community and I was working in and around the Apple community. And so I got to go to in the first tech conference I ever got to go to was WWDC 2010. This is the infamous one where Steve Jobs got up during the keynote and FaceTime failed on him. And you could look across the room and see like half of it just lose their job. But and then one person actually heckled him and told him that he should be on Verizon. And so as I was waiting in line for the keynote, which in Apple you do here, you just kind of walk into the auditorium there. It was like an iPhone launch day. We had to get up at 6 a.m. Get out in line, get a coffee and stand in line for hours. And so I'm standing in line for hours waiting to get into Moscone to watch the infamous Steve Jobs keynote. And I finally start talking to the people next to me. I'm like, Oh, what are you doing? Where do you work? How do you work? All that type of stuff. Come to find out we were building the same app, right? And so in the app store, it very much is a zero sum game. Someone's going to download your app or they're going to download someone else's app. And if you're doing the same thing, you're a competitor, right? And so instantly the conversation changed when we both realized that we were building the same app. We stopped talking about what we were building or how we were building or anything like that. And it was just like, you know, about the keynote or whatever. And it instantly shut off. And so what I realized was these walled garden communities, right? These walled garden technologies create walled garden communities where people aren't wanting to share because there is this this competitive atmosphere amongst everyone, even the developers. And so then entered Drupal. I needed to make a website for my app. I ended up choosing a theme off a theme monster. It was a piece of crap. And it was for this thing called Drupal that I never knew about. I ended up installing it. It looked nothing like the demo, hence me starting to develop with Drupal. And off we went. And as I started getting into the Drupal community, after getting into the Apple community, it was very weird for me to have like this group of people that are willing to just talk and help and be kind. Like it just wasn't something that was familiar to me. Or I had investors and business mentors. And as I was telling them, like, hey, you know, I'm going to go to this conference and I'm going to like talk about what I'm building. The first reaction was like, why? Like, why are you talking and helping other people out? Right? This is our this is our competitive advantage. We know how to build this thing better than they do. We should be keeping that to ourselves. And so what I started to find out was that in Drupal, as we code, we work together to find the best solution, right? The the phrases come for the code, stay for the community. But in reality, what you end up finding is that that doesn't stop at the code base, that that the Drupal community and the the essence of the open source community bleeds into the net and the network of businesses around it, right? And so this graphic is actually kind of special to me because when I first started getting into Drupal, I was starting to work on at the time the Omega project and I was working with some very intelligent developers there and they were literally at times just pulling me along like, you have no idea what you're doing, but we're going to go do this all together. And then what did I end up doing? I ended up turning around and saying, well, okay, I'm going to teach the person after me because the person before me taught me and I still remember an IRC one person showed up one day is like, I have two days to make a website or I'm going to lose my job. I have no idea what this Omega thing is. And we literally got credentials to the server and all of us just built the site for him. And the guy was just over the moon and he kept his job. And so what we ended up learning was that you end up having this conversation with other agencies with other groups and you're like, are you a friend? Are you a foe? Like, what is this? And I started attending my local Drupal meetup and Drupal community and started building relationships with other agencies and other developers and we started sharing tactics and techniques. At the time, I was working with smaller clients, universities, you know, small businesses and such. And then one day I get a call on its Intel and they said, hey, we got your number from someone else and they said that you're the best one for this job. We'll come to find out someone else in the community that I had worked with. They had called them to their agency and said, hey, we want you to build this new thing and it's going to be on Omega and we want you to build out the whole front end for us. And it's a black box project at Intel. It's the next new thing that Intel is going to do. Any of us at our agency would jump on the opportunity to work with a massive company like Intel. What did they do? They go, oh, I'm not the guy you want to talk to. You need to go talk to Chris. He's the guy who knows Omega better than I do. And he passed it over to me. I'm sitting there going, why did you just give up on that? Again, that competitive mindset just hadn't cleared out. And so then I started to realize some of the best relationships that I have in this community have come from the ability for me to say, oh, I'm not the best one for that. You've got to go talk to that person. They say that, oh, go talk to Chris. He knows how to do that. And as we start working together, what you have to start to do is know yourself. Know your agency. Every single one of your agencies do things really special. And they do things really good. But I guarantee you they do things not so well either, right? And understanding what you're good at makes makes you know where your gaps are, right? So for me and my team, we're the nerds in the room, we can get in, nerd out, we know the technology, the architecture, how to build the best thing in the world. But you ask us to design that thing. No way, it's going to look like it's going to look like trash at the end of the day, right? I famously always tell folks, I almost failed art in college, because the art teacher told me that I didn't mix my colors right when I was trying to recreate a Picasso. And to her, I said, well, if I could recreate colors like Picasso, I wouldn't be in your art class. And that set off a fun relationship. And so I never really got this whole art thing. I could never do it. But if you gave me a picture, I could make that picture, or I can make the website look like that picture, right? Now we get Figma and everything else. But at the time, it's like you give me a Photoshop file, pixel for pixel, I can make that thing happen. But you give me a blank screen. I'm never going to draw a website for you at all. And so I started to understand where are my gaps and started working with other agencies who are like, hey, we can design the hell out of stuff. But I don't know how to push pixels like you guys do, right? And so then all of a sudden, we start talking and, again, getting over that hump of are we friends or foes? Are we going to work together? And then pretty soon you come out to realize like, did we just become best friends? Like, are we so compatible here that we can work together to fill each other's gaps? And you end up finding that, okay, yep, we're partners, we're going to work together. Now what? Right? So like, now that we've gotten the concept of you need to start working with people, you know your gaps in your company and your agency, you've found that partnering agency that has similar but opposite gaps that you do and you have this collaboration ready. Now what do you do, right? And that what I found was, is that in trying to partner, it was always a great idea. But then all of a sudden you get into it and you're like, this is kind of messy, right? Because then again, you're both trying to run a business, you're both trying to support a team. And so one of the things that I learned was early and often, you got to clarify roles and keep the communication open. If you're not talking with the other agency constantly, things will start falling apart, right? And so what we normally do when we start partnering with an agency is we're all on Slack, we join our Slack channels together. We create all these partnering channels and our teams are one. Everyone talks to each other, devs talk to each other, biz dev talks to each other, everyone talks to each other. But then as we start to approach the roles within the project, we need to clarify them. Who's the lead? Who's the sub, right? Like, who's going to take on all of the paperwork of actually working with the client? Who's going to manage the client? Who's going to manage the team? Who's going to manage all the different pieces, right? The more that you can communicate and keep those open channels of communication open, even in times of, you know, happiness and, you know, we just landed this big client together, it's going to pay off in dividends when things start getting hard, when the client's not happy, when the, you know, the project's on the rocks or something's going wrong. If you haven't established those clear communications and roles first, then when things get tough, it's going to be even harder to try to establish those, right? The other and most important thing that I've found is, share your new business pipeline with each other, and that is like the most, you know, fearful thing at times, and it's just, you know, kind of a sensitive moment when you're like, here is all of the work that I'm bidding on, and then I'm going to tell you about it, knowing that you, if you wanted to not partner with me, you could just go talk to them and steal it from me, right? And we've had folks try to do that, and that's fine, and then you just don't work with them anymore. But what we end up doing is we actually sit down with our partnering agencies, and our agency partners with a number of agencies now, and we sit down with our partners, and we expose our pipeline, we say, here's everything that we're looking at, what are you looking at, how do we do this, right? Because then we can go into these pitches better, we can go into the RFPs better and more equipped if we know what each other are working on. But to do that, you have to look at combined success as now your goal. Your goal is no longer, I need to get my company past that five year mark, I need to get my company past that 10 year mark, now you're looking at, I need to get our companies there, right? So sometimes that means you're going to be cutting up the RFP a bit, right? Again, our team, bunch of nerds we look for and partner with a bunch of folks that are design heavy. But that's not to say that they don't have designer or engineers of their own. And so what happens when you say, well, we can do Drupal and you can do Drupal, then how do we both do Drupal, right? So maybe on this project, our devs are going to work and yours aren't. And on the next project, RPM is going to take over and your devs are going to work, right? We try to split up the work and try to make it so that our combined success will grow the companies together rather than always trying to look at what's in the RFP and just claw as much as you can, right? No one wants to be that on the opposite end of that with the with the partnering agency. And the way to look at this, and I come from a fishing and boat related community is the old saying is like a rising tide lifts all boats, right? Like if everyone is succeeding together, if you're all winning projects together, then everyone wins, right? But if one person is trying to, you know, bail their boat out and they're dumping the water into the next one, well, that just doesn't work. So. So you've got your relationship with your partnering agency solid. You've got your communication, your roles, your pipeline, everything's good there. Now you got to talk to the clients. And this is always the kind of the iffy thing. And we've gone into projects and I can't tell you how many email addresses that I have of other companies. Like I've got other agency email addresses and I just tell them now just forward them all to one email address. But I've got just a ton of email addresses, right? It's because initially everyone tries to hide these partnerships from the clients, right? Like, oh, yeah, we've got a 20 person team. And I have like there's partners and I just let them do this because I don't want to burst their bubble. But like I'm on their team page on their website as if I'm in their company. But a simple LinkedIn search shows that I have my own company, right? So it's like, you know, so my approach to this is open and honest. Do the clients know? Yes, we go into this and say, just so you know, we feel like this is going to be a better project with better outcomes if we bring in one of our partnering agencies who's a expert in this area that we're going to be working on, right? It makes you look better because the worst thing that you can do to a client say like, I can do everything and then fail at half of it and kill it at the other, right? And so if you bring in that partnering agency, all of a sudden you look like the rock star because I've brought in all the people to make this a success. But the other thing is keep one primary point of contact there. And so that's the other thing is the client goes, okay, so for instance, we started working with a very large international company and we did this. We, at the beginning in the RFP said, look, we can do this whole thing, but we feel that we're going to be better with this other agency. We're going to bring them in and the combined of us are going to work together. However, we're going to take all the contracts. It's all going to come through us if you have any problems, talk to me, if you have any issues, talk to, like, have everything flow through because the moment you diverge that, then all of a sudden you're like, oh, who talked to the client? You talked to the client? They tell you that and then all the communication channels get muddy again, right? So again, clear, open communication not only between the teams, but also with the clients is mandatory. And so the title of the topic is, or the session is, I've seen further than others. It's because I've stand on the shoulders of giants. I look at this as when I was starting my agency, I got my start by having a couple of other agencies say, hey, you know what? You're good at what you do. Why don't you guys come along with us and work with us? And now I'm able to go to other agencies and say, hey, you're really good at what you do. I want you guys to partner with us. I think a quote that I heard back in 2012 that stuck with me is from my agency owner of a large Drupal agency. And he said, I have created multiple businesses from work that I haven't done. And that stuck with me because I was just starting out at that time. I just started in the Drupal community. And I was like, I want to get to that point. I want to get to the point where I have so much work. I don't know what to do with it, but I know that I need to have someone else help me. And I'm creating other companies out of the overflow of work that I've got. So I encourage you guys to look for today, you know, if you're going to go out to the bar tonight or go out and have a meal to eat, find another agency, talk with them, figure out what they're good at, talk about what you're good at. If you get really into it, start talking pipeline already, but start talking with other agencies and learn how you can make those matches and see if you can find some partnerships out of this conference. And I guarantee you it's going to grow your agencies. So with that, surprisingly, I kept it within 20 minutes for those of you that know me know that I can talk for like hours. So I think we've got four minutes before we head downstairs for the closing session. But if there's any questions, I'm happy to answer them. We can probably have time for one or two. If you don't and you want to hop downstairs and get a good seat for the closing session, totally fine. You're not going to offend me at all. Any questions? Yes. Correct. Yep. Yeah. So everything we do is when we when we that's a good question. So is it a formal partnership or or not? We normally enter into NDAs with them. So that way you say, hey, look, we're going to be exposing our pipeline. We're going to be talking through some sensitive stuff. Let's just make sure that we're in this together. But normally what it ends up being is we almost exchange subcontractor relationships. And so they sign our subcontractor form. We sign theirs. And so now we have this ability to pass work back and forth between them. And contracts are always good. Like don't just do this on a handshake because contracts are always they're there for when things go wrong, not for when they go good. And I've had both scenarios and have wished I've had better contracts than either. So yeah. So for that, I'm always contracting with them, but you don't have to like formally merge your teams. But I have talked to and I've acquired other agencies and I'm talking to other agencies who've gone through the same thing where it's like all of a sudden you're partnering together, you're partnering together. And then all of a sudden say, Hey, why don't why are we not make this official and just get together? Right? So you'll find that that leads to to growing your team. And so you can make that more official. Right. Right. Well, we get a call. Your concept is getting a grand homicide which is a bomb. Are you obligated? Right. Right. Right. And you can you can create collectives. I've seen I've seen folks do all sorts of stuff and you can get creative with it. But that's the fun part of it. So yeah. Question over here real real quick. We've got yeah, we've got a couple minutes. So the benefits are really clear as to you know why to collaborate but what are the challenges that you might face? And how have you all my partners are watching this. I'm not going to say the challenges. So really the challenges come from communication and clearly defining how that relationship is going to work. I think for us. It's not like rates or anything like that. But billing is always a pain. Right. Like how are you you know managing that. So get that clear up front. Like we're going to send you an invoice every two weeks. We're going to send you an invoice every month. Whatever that looks like just make sure that's clear and open. So you're not like awkwardly dropping stuff on them. And then for us it's always tool sets. It's like our our agency uses slack and click up. We partner with an agency who uses Jira and teams. That's a fun conversation to have because it's like who's environment is this going to be in. We all like click up and slack better. They like click up and slack better but they have to use teams and Jira for other reasons. And so it's just like basically what our our normal priority is whoever's the primary on it. You you follow them. So you're using their tool set. You're using their techniques. And then that kind of that kind of dynamic allows you to have a little bit more control. And it's really fun when the the tables turn. And we've worked with like 500 person agencies and all of a sudden we're primary and we're an 18 person company. And all of a sudden it's like we're the little dogs in the room but we're going to tell you how to do your job. So and what's nice about it is if you have that open and clear communication no one no one really minds. So but that's that's where the friction normally comes in working with them. It's just kind of managing expectations managing the tool set deliverables. How are they going to be delivered. You know all that type of stuff. But our our clients have come to us and said our you know our partners that come to us and said our clients are staying with us because they want you. Right. So and to that point and to the point of contracts every single one of our contracts is a non-compete like if we're going to if we're going to be partnering together and whatnot that's great but if you try to go around my back and talk to the client and try to just subvert me on that that's a deal breaker like we're going to we're going to break this off and we're not doing that anymore. So and you know pick your partnership is good right. You'll you'll feel that out but again contracts are always a good thing. So I don't think I've had anyone try to steal a client from me but we've been approached by clients of our partners saying hey we want to ditch them and work with you guys alone and my response is always no I don't do that. So and then again because the community is small the the communications are small it always gets around to your partner that they did that and if you can tell them like yeah they contact me and I said no it makes that bond even stronger. So it's it's take those take those times of tests and turn them into things that will strengthen the partnership. So one last question we have time. No. All right. Thank you everyone. Thanks for staying all the way to six o'clock and.