Chris Simmance:
Thanks voiceover guy on a podcast today. I’m very lucky to have the legal mind that is Steve. How are you doing Steve?

Steve Kuncewicz:
I’m good Chris, I’m very lucky to be on a podcast with you in your splendid beard.

Chris Simmance:
Well, the beard is the third guest, I guess. So Steve, for those who don’t know you, I know you very well. We’ve known each other for quite a while. You have legalized the Lawyer Eats stuff with me for yonks across the agencies. Apart from being a massive fan of Transformers and all things Marvel, what is it you do?

Steve Kuncewicz:
I get to be a geek for a living and it’s awesome. I, having an absolute absence of actual creative talent and having spent quite a good amount of time after my law degree trying to get into agency land, found that I might be better off helping them stay sustainable, help them to do good work that doesn’t get them sued and hopefully help them to thrive.

Chris Simmance:
And you like to be a geek, what does that mean?

Steve Kuncewicz:
Um, it means that my day normally tends to involve one of my clients saying to me, uh, if we do this, are we going to get sued by X in relation, in relation to a campaign and it’s, you’ve got to think on your feet. It’s normally, I’ve had a lot of conversations around what we can do around Barbie over the course of the last couple of weeks.

Chris Simmance:
Oh yeah, I’m sure.

Steve Kuncewicz:
So, and I do want to see the film, the reviews are really good. Um, but it’s not today’s the same. A lot of issues are common across agencies that I work with, but they’re normally run by awesome people. We get to have really great conversations and then at some point be able to say that you’ve been part of the process of getting from A to B with something, whether that be a really good piece of creative work or whether that be the business going the way it wants to. It is a absolutely, it’s the privilege of my career to work with agencies.

Chris Simmance:
That’s awesome. I think, I think, um, the, the no two days are the same thing. You know, you said that just a minute ago that you tried to get into agency land, but realized that you’re probably better at the stuff that you’re great at now. No two days at the same in an agency as well. So hence why you get these calls that say, Hey, we’re going to do this really cool thing with Barbie dolls. What do you think? And then you have to go, Hmm, there’s a whole list of different, uh, uh, legal practices and all sorts of things that I need to work out, whether or not we can do these things. If we word it this way, all that sort of stuff. It’s actually quite cool, except sadly, I don’t know if anyone who’s listening to this is ever really an entire contract. Don’t tell Steve if you haven’t, um, chat GPT.

Steve Kuncewicz:
Well, yeah, but I mean, yeah, people get scared of contracts,

Chris Simmance:
Mm.

Steve Kuncewicz:
right, because they’re normally impenetrable and way too long. But with a bit of luck, if they work well, through a bit of pain, you then put them in a drawer, you never need to look at them again until it comes to renewal. Or until, you know, there’s an intervening incident. They are a, I mean, if done properly, they’re an asset of your business. You know, if you’re looking to scale or sell. and somebody asks you what kind of relationships do you have with your client? Are they underpinned by a strong contract? Then that should hopefully be a bit of an easy discussion.

Chris Simmance:
Hmm. Beyond the like the cool like on think on your feet stuff. Obviously there’s an awful lot of work that underpins the ability to do that. What is it that you do specifically for an agency leader listening right now? What’s the shopping list that they that they would pick from or generally pick?

Steve Kuncewicz:
And I would say you well, for one, get yourself a pitch NDA. I mean, NDAs are nothing new in the agency sector. And be very careful about the NDAs that you sign from clients. If you can, it’s a common theme to say, you know, if you’ve got an agreement of your own, then stick to it and you wouldn’t negotiate with Microsoft. Clients shouldn’t negotiate with you. You are handing over value when you pitch to people. You are handing over confidential information that otherwise would earn you money. And more often than not, agencies are very, very keen to get the work through the door, to get the client into the room and to pitch. And very, very often, sometimes those pitches get taken somewhere else for an agency that’s already in their roster. So start one, you know, start as you mean to go on, professionalize that process as much as you can without making it too corporate. Then maybe if you are starting to do some work or thinking about doing some work before you get to an actual contract, have a set of heads of terms. People talk about heads of terms. in relation to a corporate transaction, this is the deal we’re gonna do. You can do something similar from a commercial contracts perspective. So you will get paid for the work that you do in the interim while you’re working on the actual final agreement and then have that final agreement. Think about whether or not you can do everything as a set of T’s and C’s, many people want to but if you’re a full service agency, say doing web dev, paid media, PR, bits and pieces of comms, influencer marketing, all that good stuff. You’ll be doing lots of different things with lots of different measures of success and lots of different processes. Getting that all into a set of T’s and C’s that you don’t feel terrible reading is not an easy thing. And you might need to look at a bit more of a corporaty process. But that underpins everything you do, sets the tone for your relationships with your client more than anything else. And everything else that goes around that is just building on it.

Chris Simmance:
One thing in all of my experience in running agencies and advising agencies on accelerating their growth is that it’s almost, there’s a hesitancy to do these kinds of things because each one of those things, regardless of the purpose behind it, feels like it’s a barrier to a yes. I think… In balance, you need to consider, you know, I need to get in that meeting and need to get in that room, but also you need to think about what’s the, what’s the, the risk of, of this, and this, if it’s a two grand a month client, you might not worry about heads of terms and all those sorts of things. But if it’s a big old client and you’re going into a big old pitch and you’ve got really, you know, some agencies put weeks and weeks of effort into the pitch, they prepare the pitch, they invest time, effort, money, energy into it. You’ve got to, you’ve got to make sure that, you know, you’re protecting yourselves in the, in the right way there. But you have to have the right balance. You need to know what you’re doing because at the right size of potential business, those are things that they might well expect as well.

Steve Kuncewicz:
No they do. And I suppose the other side of that is if you were say doing a particularly big project, you need to get under the hood and do a piece of discovery work before you can actually then say what the proposal is going to be. There’s an argument that you should be charging for that now or at least if you’re delivering value, don’t be afraid to have that conversation but equally monetizing every 30 seconds. And I’m aware of the irony that a lawyer saying this carries. But there’s a balance between getting a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, and being willing to get some skin in the game. And the skin in the game bit is hugely, hugely important. But once you’ve done this a few times, then it becomes easier. Most of the contracts I draft can be saying at the end of this, I’m going to sit down with your team and talk to them about it for half an hour and explain to them how it works. And that for me tends to be the missing piece.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah, absolutely. Honestly, you pay one guy on Fiverr one time and he keeps coming back.

Steve Kuncewicz:
It’s very good once.

Chris Simmance:
He does, doesn’t he? Lots of people say it sounds like me, but I promise it’s definitely someone else. I don’t like that. I like my voice enough not to modify it.

Steve Kuncewicz:
Thank you.

Chris Simmance:
So what do you think is like beyond the thing you alluded to in terms of like some of the cool conversations you have, what’s one of the things you love the most about agencies in the agency world?

Steve Kuncewicz:
Creative alchemy, you know, you are responding more often than not to a developing issue that really makes you think on your feet. And in particular, when the world is maybe moving away from granular, personalised campaigns, you know, the death of the first party cookie, that kind of stuff, I really believe that creativity is going to make a huge sweeping comeback. You know, you go back through I mean, we know this, I’m a huge film geek. And you think about, you know, the great adverse of days gone by, people like Ridley Scott and the rest of it. There is some amazing creativity going on at the minute. Even being a carrier of someone’s handbag as part of that process, or, you know, shuffling paper clips as part of it, is just an absolutely huge privilege. And I’ve seen some of my clients, through no input of mine, they’ve done some absolutely amazing creative work over the course of the last few years.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah, and you are right. There’s, there’s a, there is a shift along these lines towards doing it different and also like, and I think this probably pays quite well into needing that legal counsel sometimes is that you aren’t just thinking about SEO or you aren’t just thinking about Google ads, or you aren’t just thinking about Facebook ads or something like that. They’re in order to get the right thing done in an agency, you need to have a collaborative approach. Now, if you’re doing agency well. You’re either big enough that has large enough departments which can run those services independently of each other, but in a connected way, one contract, one client, et cetera. Or if you’re a niche agency that’s niche to a service, for example, you only deliver SEO, you need to make sure that you are collaborating with all the other channel providers in the right way and compliantly to be able to do something cool. You can’t just do a few title tags and a bunch of content and some links anymore. And yeah, you see some rankings and stuff like that, but the reality is it’s not going to make a, it’s not going to move the needle enough. You need to be creative, which means you need to say, Hey client, can we get in a room with the PPC team? Cause we’ve got some cool ideas that will help improve everything everywhere for everyone. Um,

Steve Kuncewicz:
It’s not an easy thing to do sometimes if you’re the niche and you’re part of the roster to be able to say this is where our skill ends and this is where somebody else’s should begin and to know that you’ve got to have that you’ve got to have fewer people playing in the playpen. The playpen takes a bit of a sense of maturity and an ability to let go of some of that for the sake of the longer game of having a better client relationship.

Chris Simmance:
Absolutely. I think, you know, it does come, I’ve noticed it with the agencies that we’re working with, we part of the accelerator is that at a certain point you work out who you are and what you’re doing and that’s part of the positioning, but also like what are you doing for those people? So at some point you either go, I’m going to do just SEO for all types of SMEs, or I’m going to do all of these services for one individual type of niche. And at a certain point. You then go, well, how do I maximize and leverage the value of that client? Well, I need to keep the client happy. I need to do the right reporting. Some of that’s going to be, I need to create the right partnerships. And you go to agencies which are looking like you, but offering the partner, the related services and you say, Hey, we’ve got these things. We’re doing these things. Um, can, you know, if we, if we make the right agreements in place, when we get to a point where we need to say, let’s get a PPC team involved, we’ve got one ready in the chamber that will look after us and we’ll look after the client.

Steve Kuncewicz:
We’ve seen this in the Manchester market in the last couple of weeks. One of my best mates in the agency sector, who’s an agency owner, won a particular piece of web build work and brought in another very, very highly rated PR agency to work around the side of it. And there was an issue and they collaborated on it to get it fixed. And the first thing they did was say nice things about each other and shout about it for the benefit of both. Yeah, that’s the kind of conversation you don’t always see happening, but you love to see it. especially when there’s two people you know and respect that are able to get to that result together, it’s great.

Chris Simmance:
It is, and you know, from the reality is, and Vicky, my wife slash also operations director of the OMG center, she hates it when I say this, but a rising tide does raise all ships when it comes to these things.

Steve Kuncewicz:
I love that phrase.

Chris Simmance:
If you are competing against someone who doesn’t deliver what you deliver, just because you’re kind of a bit afraid of maybe them taking the work off you, cool. That’s what contracts are for and that’s fine. Just get on with it. And pull your trousers up and get on with it. You’ve got to, you will lose the client if you don’t collaborate and you don’t do cool creative stuff. You can’t be creative if you put the blinkers on, put it that way.

Steve Kuncewicz:
Well, you can’t be creative, you know, every great idea, what’s the phrase? It takes a village to raise a child. And yeah, if your child has a creative idea, there might be only, or, you know, a, a campaign that might be on this so far, you can take it. I think it takes more self-confidence to be able to say, this is when I need other people around that table.

Chris Simmance:
Absolutely. So we talked about something you love about agencies. And what do you think on the not so love aspect of things do you think distinguishes the best ones from the rest?

Steve Kuncewicz:
Not many. I mean, it’s the more challenging one is we briefed this to the client, we’ve sold it as a benefit, this is what we think can happen. Can you please now make it legal and do so by the end of the day?

Chris Simmance:
Right, okay. Demand on time.

Steve Kuncewicz:
And it happens, you know, things where we’re working with an influencer, can we put an agreement in place? Well, you really need that agreement to be between the influencer and the client.

Chris Simmance:
Mmm.

Steve Kuncewicz:
And if we’re getting in the middle of that, are we then straining to provide advice that goes beyond, you know, the work that we’re actually doing? You know, they’re not going to say, you’ve told us we can sign this and it’s fine. Well, then you become a lawyer. And next thing you know, clients sue you when it goes wrong. It doesn’t always. that way. But it’s the whole, you know, there’s that, Karthus was doing the rounds around Facebook the other day, two web designers, one saying, yeah, but this feature’s already been sold to the customer. That kind of thing. But, you know,

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Steve Kuncewicz:
if you want to drink coffee and type fast, it’s just the nature of the beast.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah, that’s just opened the question up for me, actually. He’s a little side track in my brain about that. So if there’s the service line at the minute in agency parlance is UGC in many cases, when you’re talking with influencers and things, and there are some very unknown agencies that have a huge amount of clout in this because they’ve got massive libraries of influencers and things, but they’re selling that influencers time for a client to hold their coffee cup. and say, nice coffee and things like that. And so you’re saying that the influencer ought to potentially have the contract with the client. Is that?

Steve Kuncewicz:
Yeah, there’s no real… Well, so you can have the client having the contract with the agency and then, so IP is one of the big issues. You create content for this brand, as part of a campaign activation, whatever else you’re doing. And client will want to be able to own that content outright so they can do whatever they want to with it. They’ll also want to be able to use the image of the influencer for whatever they want to with it. And if for whatever reason, agency stands in the middle of that, then it’s adding friction into a process where it doesn’t need to be there. As opposed to if the agreement’s directly in place with the client, they have the rights, they have the obligations, and more importantly, brand safety issues, something goes wrong, they’ve got direct recourse against the influencer rather than putting the agency in the middle of that and making it their problem.

Chris Simmance:
And presumably those sorts of things make an impact when it comes to assessments for risk and things on insurance and all sorts of other bits.

Steve Kuncewicz:
that absolutely do. And having done a slew of those kind of agreements, it’s still an industry. There’s some influences, I think, have got it better than others in terms of the fact that they want to make it a sustainable business, they want to be professional, they understand that they need to sign an agreement. But there’s plenty that say, no, I’m not signing anything. No, I’m not putting hashtag ad next to any post. Well, then you’re not doing this work for our client.

Chris Simmance:
minefield, it’s absolute minefield. So the kind of the swift demand on time I totally get. The thing is though, Steve, just to put it on the other side of the fence, having come from an agency background and worked with the legal side of things, it moves slow the wheels in your

Steve Kuncewicz:
this.

Chris Simmance:
area of the world. And so as an agency leader, what kind of advice might you give to these to people who are kind of going, this is an important and urgent thing right now. I need to speak to the lawyer guys and girls. What is it that you would say when it comes to, you know, you know, it takes time. There’s effort that goes in, but it doesn’t move quick. How, how do you, how are you going to manage that? Our expectations.

Steve Kuncewicz:
It can move quick, depending on the circumstances. Where it can move quickly is if you know a client well, if you know a document well, if it’s something you’ve done before, then you don’t need to start at a blank piece of

Chris Simmance:
Zero.

Steve Kuncewicz:
paper.

Chris Simmance:
Okay.

Steve Kuncewicz:
Too many lawyers, I think, treat every job as if you do need to start for a blank piece of paper. You need to make sure you’re doing the job properly. You need to make sure that the document fits, whatever your place fits the circumstances. What I’d say is go early. Know that… Every conversation you have doesn’t lead to a £10,000 bill. The relationship with your legal partner, whoever it is, that means you are able to pick up the phone to them. You can talk about this and then they can be thinking about it in the back of your mind so that by the time you’re asked to do something, then you can move pretty quickly. But equally, not everything is not every document is a unique snowflake of a thing. there’s no reason why if you’re working with a specialist who gets you, they can’t move that bit more quickly. Now that doesn’t mean you can always be on tap all the time, but sometimes I think it’s easy to look at your inbox and think, well, this is going to take me so long. When actually, once you get into it, it’s a quicker response than maybe you thought it was going to be. And that, I think that’s, that’s come to a lot of lawyers.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah, fair. And from not that I’m am a lawyer, but from experience of running agencies and working with agencies and working with lawyers, you should be planning your time better. So when you come to the lawyer, the only time you go to them with something important and urgent is when it literally is legally on fire, and usually you don’t have that if you plan ahead and you prevent things, but client issue you can’t plan for, fine.

Steve Kuncewicz:
Absolutely.

Chris Simmance:
But everything else you should be considerate of and thinking, right, I need that in six months time. We it’s only going to take a month. I’m not going to wait for five months. I’m going to start it now and let this move at a nice pace. So no one’s being pressured and everything’s everything works out well. Have a good relationship with the lawyer guys. They’re good.

Steve Kuncewicz:
Well, and you don’t give the lawyers the opportunity to say, we’re doing this, we’re working through the night on this and we can charge time now.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah, exactly. And so the finest legal minds in Manchester have all gotten together. They are all in a big room and it’s probably a very fun and interesting place to be. But the outcome of that is that they’ve actually done this, this alchemy that you mentioned earlier, and they have created a magic wand, Steve. You can only use this magic wand to do one thing and it will change one thing in every agency across the land. What one thing would you use that magic wand for?

Steve Kuncewicz:
No pressure.

Chris Simmance:
Hehehe

Steve Kuncewicz:
If I, so an idea came up a few years ago, prompted by a trade body actually, to say that get the finest legal minds in Manchester together and come up with a set of tons of business that become standard across all the agencies in town.

Chris Simmance:
Mmm.

Steve Kuncewicz:
Everybody can buy them from the same place, you know what you’re getting and you don’t need to change it that much. And it’s based on the idea of something pretty sensible. Now that is, because magic, look, a magic wand to make a lawyer’s life easier is not the kind of thing you’re gonna see in Harry Potter, nor

Chris Simmance:
No,

Steve Kuncewicz:
should

Chris Simmance:
sadly

Steve Kuncewicz:
it be.

Chris Simmance:
not. I mean…

Steve Kuncewicz:
Who comes to a lawyer when they’re happy? Occasionally, you know? But realistically, we are there to help solve a problem. We are a service provider in the same way as a client will come to an agency and say, we’re launching something on Monday, we don’t have any collateral. don’t have a plan, we don’t have an SEO strategy, sort it please, you know, these things happen. Making our life easier, you know, a magic wand is by its very nature an illusory thing. There may be ten, but ultimately you get to be part of that magic as opposed to waving it. That is a terrible, terrible cliche and I’ve had too much coffee.

Chris Simmance:
That’s it. Well, I mean, let’s just say that, I mean, I definitely think that there’s a case for some element of standardization. All agencies are very, very different with very, very different services, but some kind of modular version of something like that is, I don’t think it’s within the realms of impossibility. The problem is, and I can vouch for this, I’ve tried speaking to so many agencies in the last year and a half, two years, and I’ve scratched the surface of the number that I can talk to and learn from. The ability to standardize would have to be mandated.

Steve Kuncewicz:
Well, yeah, well, exactly. I mean, you say you’re all part of the group and they do need to be tailored, but equally, there’s a lot of boilerplate stuff that you can have that

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Steve Kuncewicz:
it looks the same in every single contract. And if you get some of that into clear English, if nothing else, then that’s got to be a noble end, right?

Chris Simmance:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Steve, it’s been wonderful having you on the podcast. Thank you very much for sharing some of your legal stuff, but also, you know, just generally letting the agency leaders get a decent intro into how you guys work. And thanks very much for coming on.

Steve Kuncewicz:
And thanks very much for having me Chris. Agencies, if you’re not working with Chris, change that now. End of plug.

Chris Simmance:
Brilliant. Thanks very much for that plug. Ditto back to him. Thanks very much. And in our next episode, we’ll be talking with another agency advisor, partner, mentor or trainer. In the meantime, enjoy the rest of your day.