114: Office Hours | The Mid-Year Pivot: How Optidge Keeps Teams Aligned, Motivated, and Moving All Year Long with Kelly and Lauren

Welcome to the Digital Marketing Mentor. I'm your host, Danny Gavin, and together with industry leaders and marketing experts, we'll explore the meeting point of mentorship and marketing. We'll discover how these connections have affected careers, marketing strategies, and lives. Now get ready to get human.

Hello, I'm Danny Gavin, founder of Op Digge Marketing Professor, and your host of the Digital Marketing Mentor. As we lean further into 2026, we are opening the doors to our agency even wider to give you a candid behind-the-scenes look at how we actually function when the cameras are off. Today we're tackling the challenges that come with the mid-year slump, that pivotal moment when the high octane energy of Q1 starts to meet the reality of the daily grind. To help me break down how we realign our goals and keep the team unified all year long, I'm joined by two of the most essential architects of our internal culture.

First, we have Kelly Garcia, our operations director at Optage. Kelly is the person who ensures our agency rhythm stays consistent, and that every aspect of the processes and roles we build actually fit together to drive excellence for our clients. Also joining us is Lauren Friedman, our head of people operations. Lauren brings a specialized perspective on team alignment, helping us bridge the gap between being a busy team and being a unified one, ensuring our core values of stewardship and communication aren't just words on a wall, but part of our daily muscle memory.

Today we're having a round table discussion about the art of the mid-year pivot. We'll dive into specific optage strategies to show you how we keep our tower from toppling when things get complicated. Kelly Lauren, thank you both for being here. How are you doing today?

Doing good. Yeah, doing great. Thanks for asking. Thanks for having us.

Totally. And I think one of the cool things, this is actually our first three-way podcast. So you guys are breaking the seal. Breaking the seal.

This is pretty cool. Love it. To kick off the conversation, I'd like to talk about Q1 momentum versus mid-year reality. We all start in January with high expectations, high energy, and lofty goals for the year.

So, Kelly, from an ops perspective, when do you usually see that initial New Year's steam start to fade? You know, I think momentum has that natural ebb and flow. I wouldn't say that I've ever seen a new year steam wear off as much as maybe a mid-quarter steam. And we do that.

And the way we prevent that really is like bringing everyone back together at the beginning and the end of a quarter to really make sure that everyone sees what we did, what we accomplished. They're invigorated, and then they can break out of that slump four times a year, hopefully, to then kind of reinvigorate and jump right back into the next quarter. We also get buy-in because the teams are creating those goals. And that goes from the top level from the annual goals.

Yes, the whole team is not creating those annual goals. However, the leadership team is creating them. So the leadership team has buy-in with those annual goals. It's a top-down effect, right?

We have buy-in with annual goals. We are their biggest supporters. We're the biggest cheerleaders for those goals. And then we're empowering each individual team to come up with their quarterly rocks, as we call them, to essentially have that buy-in because they, it's their idea.

Like you're going to do something and you're more excited to do something if it's your idea. So I think that's a big part of it as well. So interesting. I know we do our quarterlies, and I never thought about it like that concept where it actually like adds in that spice in life four times a year.

And now that you mention it, it's so true. So, Lauren, how do you distinguish between a team that is busy and a team that is actually aligned with our goals? Measuring team sentiment is a big one for us. It's actually part of our goals for this year is to have that measurement on a quarterly basis, to analyze it.

And we have questions on our team satisfaction survey about feeling aligned to goals so that we can get that discussion out in the open. And, you know, it's hard, especially at an agency, to separate the day-to-day work, those billable hours from the loftier goal achievement, which is why, like Kelly said, it's so important to shape company goals that, you know, align with the work that's already been done. You want to make goals feel achievable while you're pushing a little bit to reach this new level of success, which I think we did really well with our 2026 goals.

I think the team feels really connected to them and excited. Another thing that we do is we run a SWOT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. Last year we did it from the top down. This year we're doing it from the bottom up.

And that is allowing us to get more in touch with the team to hear how their capacity is doing. Do they have the tools, the resources to get their jobs done? And, you know, with that capacity, we want to see indicators that the team is able to do more than just deliver on the work that we do for clients. So are they engaging in lunch and learns?

Are they taking internal training courses? Do they have the time for research and experimentation so that they can keep up with changes that AI is bringing to our industry? So it's not just one indicator that we're looking at, but a multitude that really shows us that it's not just busyness, but alignment that we're achieving. So, Lauren, going back to the SWOT analyses as well as team sentiment analysis, I know myself sometimes it's scary to put those things out there because you get feedback that sometimes you don't want to hear.

But obviously it's better to hear it and try to correct it than not. So obviously at Optage, we're doing way more good, you know, and but sometimes we hear those things that people um, you know, aren't happy. So, what do you say to the leader that's scared of like asking the questions and hearing what's going on? They'd rather just move forward.

I'm thankful that there really hasn't been any pushback from the team, any fear indicators around doing this. The team has been, for the ones that we've completed so far, really bought in and really engaged during those sessions. And it's so important. You know, I know we're probably going to talk about our communication value a bit more, but that goes down to the core of it, which is we can talk about hard things.

And by being transparent with what is going on, it builds trust between the team that we are going to action on that. And so that's one of the goals that our people operations team has this year, which is to be super actionable and carving the rest of these teams' goals out based on what we're hearing in these first quarter SWOT analyses. I want to dive into a specific opt-ism, the share the Legos concept, which is something we shared with our internal team at our kickoff meeting at the beginning of this year.

So, how do we use the Lego analogy to describe building our agency's processes and individual roles? This is a concept that was actually developed during the early days of Facebook's growth. So we're applying some startup mindset to the team. And while we're not an explosive tech startup, we are a company in growth mode, right?

We're 10 years old now, we're hitting new pinnacles of revenue, new pinnacles of team growth. So it does apply to us. And the basics of this concept is that as you scale, there's a natural resistance that people have to give away parts of their job and knowledge, whether that's out of fear of losing their visibility, fear that the job won't get done as well or the same way, or just a lack of time to do training. So it's really imperative that we remember sharing the Legos is the only real way to build.

It's sharing knowledge of processes, of tools, of systems, how things get done well without holding too tightly to there only being one right way of doing things. So it's a mindset shift that we've asked the team to embrace and to create time to share these Legos through shadowing each other, hosting lunch and learns, posting about new ideas that they're seeing online, that we can adopt at Optage, new tools, new ways of thinking. And, you know, it's something that the team has already been doing in bits and pieces.

But by again, calling it out loud, bringing the concept out in the open, it puts a line in the sand that people are able to walk across really intentionally. So by the time this episode is published, we'll be approaching the mid-year mark. Let's talk about the importance of strategic realignment and what things can be done to ensure that teams are still on the same page with company goals and expectations. So, what are the specific indicators, KPIs, or our spidey senses that tell us it's time for a mid-year pivot?

So for me, and this is going to be no surprise, obviously, to you, Danny and Lauren, because we talk about this a lot internally, there's two numbers, right, that we're really looking at every day. And that is our profit margin and our cost of labor. Because I am, as the operator, as the operations director, while I have an analytical view and I have a, you know, subjective kind of qualitative, I guess, impression of things, my first thing is the quantitative. I want to know our KPIs.

I want to know where we stand. And so those two KPIs that are the most important again, our profit margin and cost of labor. What I want to see throughout the year is that profit go up, that cost of labor either stays stagnant or go down, because it means that we are hiring the right people at the right times and we are making the right amount of money, getting the right clients, getting the right influx of funds and income in. And if that's not happening, then we need to look at what we need to shift, right?

I need to say, okay, do we need to hire less? Do we need to become more efficient? Do we need more clients? And that is going to help us figure out what that pivot is.

And so that's my main thing. And obviously there is the qualitative, but I think that is more from the people ops perspective of like how we pivot in that sense as well. So, how do we set mid-year markers for the team that show we are on the right track, even if the final win isn't fully visible yet? Yeah, I think the transparency in our progress, like Kelly mentioned, we have quarterlies where we are talking openly about these goals.

We're reporting on them weekly, we're surfacing progress during our leadership all hands. So these goals are very front and center for the team and they're developed in unity of the team. So we're letting them know what needs to pivot, what needs to shift, if we're needing to do some reassessment towards the goals to make them more achievable, if there's a hurdle that crops up that we didn't anticipate because of so many factors that can affect, you know, success towards those two numbers that Kelly called out.

Having that transparency and communication, even if we're not at the finish line, we're able to measure our progress steadily through the year so that nothing's coming as a surprise to the team. There isn't a big, oh my gosh, when we're come to Q3 and a huge like push towards the finish line. It's more of a marathon rather than a sprint. Yeah.

And to add to that too, I think it's also the way we present this information as well, right? We talk about, I think there's going to be a lot of common themes throughout this conversation. And one of them is that buy-in theme. When we're illustrating where we stand or if we need to pivot or what the mid-year, where we're at mid-year, we're also relating it in terms of what it means for them, right?

So going back to cost of labor and profit, I'm saying, hey, if we have a higher profit, we can afford to pay you more. We can give you bonuses, we can do incentives, we can hire more people to help. And so it's all in that context of yes, we're going to give you the numbers, tell you where we stand, what we have to do to achieve it, and we're going to relate it to you as an individual at the company because you got to look out for number one at the end of the day. And that is also a part of our stewardship core value of looking out for our team and our clients.

So in a remote agency or really any agency, it's easy for priorities to get blurred when things move fast. And often here at Optage, things are moving fast. So, how do we practically use our goal setting sessions to bring people back on course when things start to feel slightly off? Giving the teams ownership to interpret how that goal can be exercised by their team.

So the leaders of each team get together in our annual goal setting off site, which happened last November. We all had lots of discussion about what's going to be achievable, what's going to move the needle. And then in our new year launch, we then broke the teams out into groups so that they can say, what can we feasibly do to move things forward? How can we achieve these goals with the tools, the resources, the capacity that we have, and leverage the strengths of each team towards accomplishing that goal together?

And we've been playing with how we do this, like the actual tactical how we do this. And we'll talk a little bit later about iteration. We've been iterating on this a lot. And what we typically like to do is identify those milestones that help us achieve those goals and what done looks like.

So we want to know, okay, this goal is done when XYZ is complete, whether or not we have the milestones baked in. XYZ needs to be complete for this to be done. If we're feeling slightly off, we're going to look at that and say, are we close to having these things achieved and done? What percentage are we to having these things done?

And then we can reevaluate where we have to go from there. Yeah, we also started adding a letter grade to ourselves, which is a psychological motivational factor. Everybody wants to be an A plus student, right? So when people see that we're doing a C or a B minus, there's a natural motivation that's baked in there for people to say, well, what do we need to do to get an A?

And so I think combining what Dunn looks like, these grades that we're giving ourselves, it allows us to, again, be realistic with the team, be transparent with the team, and to motivate them to get back on course, like you called out. I also think it helps too, and I don't think we address this anywhere else. I think it helps too that I, by I, I also mean us, are very strict more and more as we go on having one goal, one quarterly rock per team. Because a lot of teams get into this thing where they have like 30 goals and then yeah, everything gets blurred.

People feel like they're just running around with their heads cut off. Nothing feels achievable because there's so many things. It's the same thing of like, if everything is priority one, nothing is a priority. We do one goal to say, this is the one thing.

If you get nothing else of all the projects you want to do internally as a team done, this is the one thing you have to do. That's it. One thing. And so that way they can focus on that one thing and not worry about all the different plates they have spinning in the air outside of obvious client work.

Okay, let us pivot into the culture and rhythm of a remote agency. Many times, especially in a remote first work environment, a thriving company culture is not only hard to create, but also involves more creativity to spark momentum and participation. Because you can't just like huddle everyone into a room quickly or, you know, hand out, you know, candies in the aisles. I don't know.

Pizza party. Pizza party. So how do you ensure unity is built into the work itself rather than just in planned culture team building activities? Because we want that unity not just to happen at certain times, we want it to be at all times of the day.

We work really hard, and I think Optage has succeeded at removing as many silos from the org as possible. It is baked into the nature we want teams to be highly collaborative when they're working across departments, especially for clients, whether that's in the pod system that we introduced last year, which has been going incredibly for spurring that collaboration from the feedback we got from the team, or whether it's on calls where strategy gets laid out and finalized. And, you know, our team talks to each other on a daily, maybe even hourly basis in open forums instead of closed conversations.

So the information that's shared gets to be absorbed by all of the team members so that there's active learning, there's active buy-in that's going on instead of having it be in a closed room or an office space where only a few people are present. Using our Slack channels openly is a tactic that I think works really successfully for us. Another tactic that we use are check-ins and proactive context sharing. Kelly, do you want to share more about that?

I'm a context queen, right? Context is non-negotiable. I truly feel people need the background and they need to understand why we're doing something to again get that buy-in, right? I'm not gonna get your buy-in if they don't know what I'm selling you.

What am I selling you? Why am I selling it to you? Just like we do in marketing, right? Like, why am I trying to sell you this thing?

Here, here's all the information you need to know. I feel like you can't expect anyone to fully commit to the work if they're operating in that darkness of not knowing all the pieces. They can know, obviously, from a leadership perspective, there are some things we cannot share. It just is what it is.

Companies, it's how we operate, right? But if we can share it, we will share it. And it just really makes people commit more and feel more like they're working toward that shared goal. I think having context makes goals feel more tangible rather than nebulous or far off, impossible to achieve.

And when you understand the why behind doing something, you become a lot more tactical in the activities that you're doing since you know the results of those activities are going to have a direct impact on the goal you're trying to accomplish. So explaining that why, explaining that through line of when we do this, it results in that makes people have that opt-in to, you know, doing the work together. Yeah, and I agree. And in our lives, there's so much transparency because of social media and other things.

And sometimes when it comes to the corporate world or to the business world, that like lags behind a little bit. Like everything else in our life, we're seeing behind the scenes of what's going on. And typically when people are used to that and that's how they live and breathe, having that within their work environment as well really helps. So it's awesome that we do that here, but it's definitely an area that many corporations can struggle with.

But when they realize, hey, if we actually tell people the reason and why we're doing this, it could help. I've seen so many companies become full of, you know, discord and struggle because the leadership doesn't take the time to explain here's why we made this decision, here's why we're doing such and such factor. When you don't fill that space in, people are going to naturally fill it in with their own answers. And those answers aren't usually, you know, leaning towards the positive.

It's you usually leaning towards the negative. So we can create that positive culture by just giving that shared understanding to people. A good example I have of that is back in 2020 when we first became remote. There was a big life event that happened to me during that year.

But I didn't really, at that point, I didn't understand that I needed to share it with everyone. But because that was I was going through that, I was acting a certain way and it was affecting others. And people were actually getting very frustrated and had no clue. Only later, when I then revealed what was going on, I was like, oh my gosh, now I understand.

So if only if I would have mentioned it the first place, it would have changed everything. And obviously that was the first big year of remote, so it's understandable, but it's just a it was a good taste and an eye-opener to me, where it's like, okay, it's we've got to over-communicate. Like we said, got to give context, give information, and that's how we are gonna be successful. My husband, who's also a producer, so he does a lot of this operations type stuff.

He always taught me, and this is what he teaches others as well, is like over-communicate until someone tells you to be quiet. And for me, right, I had my own personal thing this past year, and I was, I am an oversharing queen. Like I overshared, so I was like, you know what? You know where I'm at.

This is why it's happening. And it was good because then you get to kind of really put a story or a reason behind something that then you can move forward with. And then you can get help if you need it or all that kind of good stuff, right? Remote culture doesn't sustain itself and requires active leadership to prevent silence and disengagement.

So beyond the formal meetings that we have, what are the small moments or rhythms we've built into the Optage Week to keep that connection alive? I think our company headlines that we run every Monday is one of the best ways that we get a cultural pulse and just an all-around understanding of what's going on with our teams and our accounts. You know, people are sharing what they did for the weekend, how they relax, we're sharing wins together. We have an open discussion about where uh certain teams or certain accounts are struggling so that we can get that out in the open.

And I've seen many times a team leader will call out, we're struggling with this. And another team leader will say, Hey, I have a solution or I can help you with that. Let's get together after this call. So this is a huge part of keeping us on track during, you know, week over week.

And, you know, celebrating those wins together, I think is one of the highlights. Like every time we get an upsell, every time we get a new account, it lets even people who aren't tied to the accounts, like myself and Kelly, to know the rhythms of the business and it helps us to plan for moving forward as well. I'll add on also, we've started building in recognition and awards for the team around our cultural alignment, which is another way to just highlight those four pillars.

You know, we have stewardship, mentorship, excellence, and communication. And we've been celebrating team members who showcase that and explaining, again, explaining the why behind each recipient of that award so that it inspires the team to do more of those things or to find their own ways to represent that value so that they can win an award because that recognition is special. It's just a little Extra nod of thanks that we can give them that really celebrates what brings us all together, that through line of culture that we all follow.

So if you've been listening to the episode so far, you can see that communication is key. And that is why communication is one of the four core values of Optage. Internally, we prioritize communication to ensure that tone and intent are clear. And we don't just expect it like from top down, but from side to side, bottom up.

We want everyone communicating. So how does communication prevent team members from filling in the blanks with worry during high pressure periods? Yeah, I think we prevent that by talking openly about successes and challenges, right? We've we've touched on this briefly, but in those quarterly meetings, we don't just focus on what what's next.

We look at our year over year progression. So we'll look at, and I don't even mean like down to like annual, right? We even quarterly will look at what did we do last year, last this quarter last year, versus just an overarching like year over year total. So people really understand where we're at, where we were previously, and what's next.

And we do that by discussing the good, the bad, and the ugly, right? Like we're not just going to sugarcoat things. We are going to do it in a way that is still positive and aspirational. And we're not afraid to rip the band-aid off when we have to and tell people the hard truths in order to make sure that they understand where we're at.

And to Lauren's point earlier, you made a really good point about like if we tell people actually what's happening, they won't fill in the blanks, right? They won't think about all that and do all that. It just replaces that worry, right, with understanding. And the understanding creates steadiness, right?

Even when it's a pressure-filled time, knowing where we're at, where we're going, and why is just so paramount. And I think we also make sure that when we're talking about the challenges we're facing, whether it's a goal that's off track or something unexpected that's happening because a client churns or what have you. We're making sure that we're not framing these challenges that it's anyone's fault or that there's any one reason, but rather we're making it like a call to action to solve the problem together, rather than just saying, well, we failed, we didn't do it.

That's where our excellence value of trying your best really comes into play. So, with that, talking about these hard things, transparent communication is really the only way to operate when you have a remote agency or a remote structure in your company. So, talking about excellence, can you speak to any of the other core values that we have at Optage that can be positioned as a tactic for mid-year motivation? The two that really come into play for me are going to be stewardship and excellence.

I think stewardship reminds us that it isn't, this isn't just a job. Like we we're caretakers of the company's health, of our clients, of each other. And, you know, mid-year is when that mindset matters most. Are we protecting what we've built?

Are we investing in it wisely? It's really important to use stewardship and look at things through a lens of stewardship throughout the year, especially mid-year. And then on top of that, I have for excellence, right? Excellence for me.

And I talked about this earlier a little bit. Excellence is iteration, it's not perfection. I always bring up excellence for mid-year motivation of, hey, we are still being excellent, even if this hasn't isn't working yet, or even if we have another, you know, summit to climb. You know, it is, it's still there.

We still have excellence. We are still being excellent because we are looking at where we're at and we are figuring out where we have to go and how we need to iterate in order to get there. So that's big for me. Yeah, I think I'd agree.

Stewardship and excellence, you know, for me and how we see that at PeopleOps, it's it's trying your best for each other and our clients. That's a huge underlying theme in Optage. And we can't win at everything, we can't solve every single problem, but we can try our best. And that's the best that we can do.

And so that's what we really make sure to communicate to our teams is that we just expect them to give it their best shot. And if they fail, look at what they can learn from it and share that learning with the rest of the team, communicate it so that we can, again, like Kelly said, iterate and and move things forward. And what is it? Perfection is the enemy of success.

Is that the first of done. Of done. But like I think that's very true, right? It's it can sound trite because it's an overused phrase, I think, but like it's overused for a reason.

Because it's right. So I think it's a really solid point. I had so much fun today because there is an individual who runs his own um practice. He's the consultant, helps people with time management.

And he's basically in the place where I was, let's say nine, 10 years ago. And it's so interesting that people come up with so many excuses about how I can't delegate and can't do because in their mind it has to be perfect. It has to be perfection. And one of the main points that we were covering today was, and I know I speak about this often, but I'm gonna push it again, that when you realize that someone else can only do 80% of what you could do, then you're gonna feel comfortable of handing that off.

And so it's the same sort of theme where if if you have perfection in your mind, there's no way you're gonna be able to grow yourself, handing off to others. And that's why it's so important to just be kind, kind to yourself, kind to others, realize that there's a lot can be done and a lot of good and a lot of benefit, even if it's not perfection. Like we talked about earlier, sharing the Legos means someone may not do it as perfectly as you do, but that's where mentorship can come in.

You can train people to be better, but by expecting perfection straight out of the gate, you're never going to be able to hand anything off. It's impossible. I'd like to talk a bit about how some of these core values we just talked about and the work that you both do to unite the team spills over to the client side and is seen in the work we produce for our clients. So, how do we apply our core value of mentorship to help team members map out their growth steps, even when the daily grind gets heavy?

We actually are introducing a new element from the PeopleOps team this year, which is individual growth planning. So this is a combined effort between the manager and the individual. The manager is calling out skills that they'd like to see the individual learn. The individual also has ownership to call out what they want to learn and what they think is going to move their career forward.

So it's a combination of things that affect the clients, things that affect the business, and all of these elements that come together to create a plan that's unique to that person. And it's open to all of our team members, whether they're a contractor or an employee. It's something we want to see developmentally that people are really putting some effort into. And again, just that call to action to share the Legos and be more proactive and more intentional around doing that, are key elements there.

Yeah. And if I can add to it, I think too, there's other parts. We have our lunch and learns. That is a way that we are mentoring team members that aren't necessarily within a certain department.

It's anyone can learn from anyone in the company about anything that is presented. Um, we actually have our paid social strategist, Grace, doing a lunch and learn, I think, next Friday, um, about some really cool uh stuff she's found out in the industry that she needs to share with everyone. And so, like, she's gonna share that with everyone in the company who wants to attend so we all know and we can all grow from that. And then I think Lauren, something that I'm actually a little surprised you didn't mention, which is awesome, is our cross-training.

So we recently merged our paid media, our paid social and paid search teams. And so we're piloting cross-training with them so they can learn each other's roles and work more or work better within that pod system. And that isn't necessarily locked down to those departments. If Emmy, who is one of our account managers, wants to learn more about paid search, she can do cross training.

If someone else wants to learn about SEO, they can do cross training. It doesn't matter what role you're in, you can always learn from other people and grow in the company in general. When roles shift or new team members join mid-year, how do we use our onboarding process and mentorship initiatives to integrate them into the existing Lego structure without toppling the tower that we so carefully have built? Each manager, when we have a new team member joining, is building a custom onboarding plan that's going to address the needs of the team, the needs of our clients, and combines the strengths that the candidate we've brought into the team is bringing to the table and what short and long-term goals we have for these people.

So we're thinking critically about who should be the onboarding leader, who should be shadowed. And the goal is having this all-around holistic understanding of processes and how Optage works for our clients while leaving room for the unique outside perspectives that new faces are gonna bring to the team because there's a lot of work being done outside of Optage, and these new people are bringing their own knowledge, their own concepts, their own expertise. And we want to build that in and create a stronger Lego structure, a tower that is impossible to topple because we have this combined effort.

So that's when we add new people. But let's talk about when we have that Lego structure. What happens when we realize mid-year that a brick, a specific process, something that we've designed isn't fitting correctly? How do we make adjustments without causing chaos for the rest of the team?

Our team expects iteration in everything we do, not rigidity. We really do try to drive that point home in everything we do. And so if a brick isn't fitting, and in this, let's say this scenario, a brick is a piece of a process or a process is missing completely. So maybe there's just a brick missing.

We'll tweak the process, right? It's not what I like, what I or the leadership team says is law in those processes. Again, we need everyone's buy-in. So if we're going to create a new process or update a process because it's not fitting correctly, we're gonna get the buy-in from the managers first.

So everyone that runs their individual teams. And it's we don't silo them, we don't say you can't share this with your team ahead of time. We actually encourage them to discuss that new process that's coming with their team first, apply their feedback to their comments and what they're putting on the document. So then when we roll it out to the whole team, we really do have that buy-in because the team helped create the process ultimately, right?

We're rolling out a process now that has to do with um people operations requests, right? Requesting help from people operations to kind of reduce the noise and let that team work uninterrupted as much as they can. And that went right to managers first. They reviewed it first.

I have comments from people. I'm gonna go and iterate on that process now with the stuff in mind and then re-release it to the team and say, hey, is this more of what you want? Great. If it is, now we're gonna say, okay, we're locked in, we're ready, we're sharing it with the wider team.

So that's how we do that. If it's like a small update, we'll just do it, obviously. But like if it's a bigger update or if it's a new process that we're rolling out to add a brick to whatever tower we're trying to build. Yeah.

And just to call back to those weekly headlines, we have a section for operational updates where Kelly is able to share what's coming down the pipeline so that nobody's surprised. Like when we have a process change that's coming, she's calling it out and saying, I'm working on this for the team. Here's the why behind it. And here's what the ultimate goal of adjusting this process is going to, you know, result in.

So there's again, just open communication about why we're needing to make iterative changes that ultimately allows a lot more acceptance. The tower is strong because we're talking about the tower continuously. And when we roll out processes, by the way, our process documents have overviews and a literally why is this important? Why does this matter?

So when someone looks at a process, there's also that context and that communication there. And one other thing I wanted to stress that is why it's so important to have in-person meetings as well. Because sometimes if you just list a whole bunch of things on Slack, people don't read it, you know. But if you're actually in a meeting and we're presenting it and we're shouting it out, people are a lot more aware.

And therefore having that combination works really, really well. Yeah, I I sometimes have to wait for people to review things because I just post it in Slack. I don't know who you're talking about. No one could you be talking about?

No one. All right. We've seen great success with our onboarding systems. And that's not just me talking.

I feel like if we did a survey, nine out of 10 people, they're like, oh my God, I've never seen an onboarding like that ever. It's pretty cool. And we've done a great job with promoting safe spaces for silly questions. How do we apply that same concept of psychological safety to our veteran team members when they have to learn a new skill or pivot their strategy mid here?

And when we talk about veterans, we have people on our team who have been here seven, 13, maybe six, seven years, right? It's been pretty cool. I mean, it doesn't matter if you're new or if you've been with the company since like day one, like some team members have been, there's always room for growth. And that's really capitalized with the mentorship value, right?

One of our longest standing leaders is getting coaching right now to grow skills. Our paid search and paid social teams, like Kelly mentioned, are doing cross-training so that they can prepare for future shared work, future shared strategy. We have check-ins on a regular cadence with every team member. And like I mentioned, we're starting this year rolling out those individual growth plans so that any team member can take advantage of that, so that we are giving more structure and more visibility into those skills that are growing.

I even asked a silly question about our services to our sales and marketing leader the other day. And there was no judgment, there's no hesitation on her part. She, we had a quick little discussion about it, and I learned something new. And there's no fear from our leadership to not have every answer, but rather there's a willingness to go find the answer or to collaborate on the answer.

And that I think is with all of these combined elements, building that psychological safety that you called out. Yeah, and and I think it's funny. I was gonna touch on what you just added to this. I was gonna touch on that of like the leaders within the organization, like we are not afraid to ask any kind of question we need to.

We know how to humble ourselves better than the rest. And I think like that again shows the team that, you know, at the end of the day, we are all on the same level in growth and knowledge and what we're trying to achieve. We're all seeking that growth. And so it's okay.

It doesn't matter if you've been here one day or, you know, a hundred days or a hundred years, like it's okay to ask those questions. It's okay to get help when you need it. All right. It's time for a lightning round, the fast five.

Kelly and Lauren, I would love for you both to share. If you don't have an answer for one of them, it's totally fine. So, number one, what's a book or podcast that changed your perspective on leadership? So it's funny, I'm not a I'm not a leadership self-help podcast person.

Um, it's just not how I roll, but I do listen to a lot of history podcasts and some of them about terrible people. I listen to something called Behind the Bastards, I listen to Noble Blood, and I listen to like uh the Queen's podcast. And it's basically about historical figures, whether they're good, even current figures too, whether they're good, bad, what they've done well, what happened, because I feel like learning from history, learning from the past is the best way. Like what worked, what didn't, as opposed to kind of the assuming or the, you know, thinking kind of that way.

Yeah. And then I've been working my way through range by David Epstein, which is all about the science behind when you start your career going broader rather than deeper. It develops you into a better leader, a better worker over time. And it really opened my eyes to some of the imposter syndrome that I had and that I'm sure others have, when, you know, you maybe aren't as technically strong or technically knowledgeable.

It shows that you always have room to grow, even if you're mid-career, late career, that there's a trajectory behind you with the broader range of skills that you've acquired through your lifetime. So that's one I've been really enjoying. It's awesome that you mentioned that because um a former guest on the digital marketing mentor, Andrea Cruz, she joined my class last night at Bauer, and she spoke about how becoming broad was actually the way that she was able to go up in the company.

And now she's like the head of B2B marketing for a really large agency. So that definitely is a strong theme. It's just cool how I've heard it twice in a day. That's also my theme, too, because I've I've I've gone broad rather than growing up, and that's been really helpful for me and really kind of where I found my place, which is really cool.

All right. What's your go-to productivity tool that isn't AI? Well, you know, it's funny when we got to look at these a little bit, I told Lauren I was gonna make this joke and I'm still gonna make this joke. My first answer is Adderall.

No, I, you know, I'm a neurodivergent, wonderful human. And and because of that, I am not a planner calendar person. Like I don't do, like I don't pick one thing and have that one thing that keeps me productive and keeps me in line. Mine is a whole amalgamation of things, right?

I am a fractional worker, so I am working at multiple places at once on any given day. So using one calendar, one PM tool or one chat doesn't actually work for me, right? It's not effective. And so for me, it's a combo of everything.

I'm using a PM tool, I'm using my calendar, I'm writing things down. I'm using my Google Home to remind me when I have to stop working to go pick my kids up from daycare. Like I'm using all of the different things I have for all different purposes at different times in the day. Yeah, I'll echo my calendar, my Slack reminders, like remind me later notifications are my go-to's.

Like if it's not on my calendar, it's probably not gonna get done. Um, I am also a neurospicy uh worker. So I I love any system. It's hard for me to keep to a system, but uh using that calendar system and our Slack thread system has been so, so helpful in keeping me productive.

And and I will say another thing that does help. And if we ever want to hire them, you're more than welcome. Mia, especially, she's almost four, so probably not legal enough to work. She will just ask a question or ask me to do something repeatedly for a half an hour every minute.

So I could just use her to keep me productive if I needed to. Where's that report? Are you doing that report? Where's the budget?

So, what's the best piece of advice you've received from a mentor? This is less from a mentor, and not that the person isn't a mentor, but and more from just friends and other mentors. This is actually something I've heard from a lot of people, you know. And I think I mentioned before, like about not being afraid to ask silly questions, those things, humbling yourself to a degree.

I used to think that being self-deprecating was humbling myself. So making jokes that are just not that are off color about myself, about my skills. And we could start a whole nother podcast about how that's probably rooted in being a woman and all these other crazy things. And what I will say is I've heard a lot of really good advice to stop doing that.

And while it's a hard habit to break, I know some of the people that have mentioned it have already noticed that I'll either correct myself mid-sentence if I'm being self-deprecating at this point, because I'm really trying to show people that I am capable, I am a leader, and I am great at what I do. And you should cower in fear. No, you should respect that and appreciate that about me. And I should appreciate about that myself.

And mine also not from a mentor, but from a customer who told me the worst thing they can say is no. And that was encouragement for me to ask for what I deserved, to ask for what I wanted, to go after, you know, hard clients or uh new clients. Like the worst thing that Optage could have said was no, but thankfully they said yes to me, right? And that was after coming back and asking a lot of questions to you guys and showing you a different way of approaching the sales process, I think.

So it encourages me to be really creative and to not let my fears stop me. And to be fair, we said yes twice. So what's your favorite way to celebrate a team win? Mine's a full-blown slack party.

I used to do it a lot more. I'm like a gif queen. I love using gifts. And so for me, it's like I'm gonna just like spam you with gifts and emojis and fun things because we are remote.

It's not like we can have a pizza party every time someone does something awesome, although that would be great. But so, like, it's like just getting in there and celebrating and encouraging leaders to also post people's wins has been really, really cool of like post it so we can celebrate it. And sometimes if I see someone post something like in a separate channel, I think we talked about this with one of our clients that we were having a tough time with. And we we got a big win from them.

They had posted it in that client channel. And I very quickly was like, forward to general. Like, this is not getting celebrated here only. This is getting celebrated across the org.

And so I'll do that as well when I want to have a Slack party. Yeah, I think mine is during our company headlines when we have that section for company wins, seeing like the little explosion of reactions and watching all the comments popping up in the chat thread. It just energizes you and it it allows us all to like cheer each other on in a very active and continuous way. Just makes me think of all the companies that don't do these things.

It must be so like quiet and bare and cold. Boring and sad. Basically, that fits well with our final question. One word that describes the optage culture in 2026.

Y'all are gonna laugh. So surprising. Summit. I was joking actually about this question, and I said, you know, I'm also kind of an analogy queen.

I like I make analogies that probably never existed before. I use analogies, all that kind of stuff. And when we were doing our annual planning, we were like, okay, you know, we won this year, we climbed this mountain, and every time you climb the mountain, there's just another mountain. Like it's a continuous range, right?

So summit for me, because this is also how we started the year. I said, hey, we planted our flag. Now we have to do our next summit. We have to climb this next mountain, but we have all these tools that we learned from the last one.

And now let's bring them on the next mountain. And guess what? It's gonna be the same next year, the year after, and the year after. It's like Everest times 10.

I think mine would be proactive. Um, that's a big shift that we're starting to really put in for people operations and spread that through the teams, is that we need to shift from a reactive mindset into a proactive one where we're planning for our successes and making decisions as if we're already going to win and not operating from a place of fear or a place of reactivity. So, yeah, proactive is going to be mine. Also, just because I have to say efficiency, also.

We want to be more efficient. So we can do all those cool things. Well, Lauren and Kelly, we've knocked this episode out of the park. Thank you so much for joining us, and thank you for tuning in to the Digital Marketing Mentor.

We'll speak with you next time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Digital Marketing Mentor Podcast.

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