We had the pleasure of joining Chip LaFleur of LaFleur Marketing at Startup Grind, Grand Rapids’ second event in January. LaFleur Marketing is a team of 21 full-time staff and a handful of freelancers working to service clients across the United States and grow roots in Grand Rapids. The discussion centered around how to create and maintain a winning culture at an agency as you continue to scale. Here are some of our takeaways.

Relationships Built on Value

ROI over Hours

Early in Chip’s career he experienced agency life where everything was tracked and billed. He didn’t like it very much. While Chip has not done away with tracking hours, he has worked hard to build a culture focused on return on investment (ROI) at LaFleur Marketing. This means he works with his team to understand the client’s end goal and establish other forms of accountability around achieving those goals.

Being a Partner

LaFleur Marketing strives to be a partner with their clients in order to build relationships based on value. For each project they do Chip asks, “Are we moving the needle?” “Are we worth having around?” Hopefully the answer is “Yes” and LaFleur Marketing continues to grow alongside their client’s growth.

Customers Over Leads

One way that LaFleur Marketing is seeking to disrupt the marketing field is their emphasis on helping their clients gain customers over increasing leads. By focusing on what makes the client money they can better show ROI on the work that they do.

Relationships Built on Trust

Maximize Your Output

LaFleur Marketing’s ability to focus on building value for clients over the billable hour is in great part due to the trust Chip places in his team. To establish trust Chip looks to align accountability to things that have meaning. “How can we maximize our output?” and “Are people working successfully?” If being in a chair 40 or 60 hours a week won’t maximize output what might we do instead? Chip firmly believes that employees should be trusted to answer those questions for themselves.

Paying attention to people

An important part of the culture Chip has built at LaFleur is anchored on paying attention to people. He does this in several ways:

The company sends out regular anonymous surveys to get employee feedback and suggestions.
They provide a generous vacation policy with more time off available as needed (within reason of course).
They work hard to identify leaders who are eager to learn about and empathize with other people
They talk about life stages (such as having a kid) and provide flexible scheduling

3 Pieces of Advice

Have Faith in Content

Investing in content is Chip’s first recommendation for marketing. To do content marketing well Chip recommends creating material that is educational and informative over sales driven. Even if it takes a few years, you need to have faith in your content. It took three to four years of heavy investment in content marketing before Chip saw much of a return, and since then it has really taken off.

Another long term time investment of LaFleur Marketing is their podcast. While the podcast itself has never had large numbers of listeners and is not a large portion of their website, it has been an invaluable resource for those who end up becoming clients. Sometimes you have to look past the summary analytics and find the people behind them.

If you are looking to learn more about how to improve your content creation we recommend reading our previous post: 6 Tricks to Improve Content With the Before & After Grid.

Give Up Control to Scale

If you want to scale your startup Chip recommends starting by recognizing the things you are not good at and then finding people who are good at those things. You are going to have to give up control of some things in order to scale. Letting people who are better than you at them take over will help you continue to grow.

Scaling also requires establishing systems that have room to grow. At LaFleur Marketing, Chip and his team have developed a system that allows them to bring in freelance workers as needed. This flexible system has also resulted in more flexible schedules for regular employees. As they continue to grow, LaFleur is able to bring on freelancers with whom they have established relationships as new employees

Find Purpose

LaFleur Marketing commits a half day every month to community involvement and once a year they provide a free non-profit website build for a local organization. These efforts support causes in the community that might not otherwise have access to a full team of marketing experts. There is also a series of other benefits that come from these community activities. Chip says, “We like to think we do things for good reasons but there is often a business reason.” Some of these other benefits include:

Helping employees find purpose in the work they do, and keep motivated day to day
Building community awareness
Connections with other organizations
Long-term partnerships with nonprofits

About Startup Grind

Startup Grind is partnered with Google for Startups. They nurture startup ecosystems in 125+ countries through events, media, and partnerships. The Grand Rapids Chapter launched in November 2019 and has continued to see growth in both membership and involvement.

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