LINKS "The Great Convergence Is Upon Us" by Blair Enns "CRM: The Train Coming At You" by Blair Enns AltGroup.net website "Eight Gauges on Your Agency Dashboard" by David C. Baker The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success by William Thorndike "Rising From the Ashes: A New Agency Model" by Blair Enns   TRANSCRIPTION DAVID C. BAKER: Blair today we're going to start over. Both you and I are going to start over. We're going to pretend to start over anyway, and the topic is If I Were Starting a Firm Now. In other words this is a firm that you and I work with, and the folks who listen to this podcast generally. If I were starting a firm like that now, what would I do differently? We're going way back in time because I ran a firm ... you worked at multiple firms, and I started and ran a firm for six years. My goodness, I would do so many things differently. If we talked about this 10 years ago, the answers would be different. If we talked about it 10 years from now, the answers would be different. But at this moment in time, what would we do differently if we were going to start a firm now? Are you up for that topic? BLAIR ENNS: I am up for it, and as you've pointed out I have never owned a firm before. I've run a small office, I've been the number two in a larger office, but I've never owned a firm. So I'll try it one, let's do this. DAVID: Okay. We're going to ping pong with some questions here, and I'm going to start by asking for your opinion on something that's really the big umbrella here. The reason I want to ask you is because you recently wrote a lot about this, and it was a provocative article the things that you talked about. I haven't talked with you to see what kind of feedback you got about it, but here is the question; what category of firm would you start? Would it be a digital firm? Or a dev shop? Or a UX shop? Or a PR firm? How would you start a firm from a category standpoint if you were starting over? BLAIR: I think the piece you're referring to is something I wrote called "The Great Convergence Is Upon Us." The convergence I was talking about is the convergence of design, which is often UX design, software engineering, and business consulting. I'm seeing most of the best lucrative, most thriving, most impactful firms that we're working with these days are in that space. I think it's really hard to think of starting a new firm today that doesn't combine those three skills, so I absolutely would combine those three skills because I think that's where the big opportunity is in the market place but that doesn't really narrow things a lot. If I look at what I know the world of selling, and also some of the world of marketing ... what I've been interested in for a bunch of years is this intersection of sales and marketing. I wrote something on this ... oh man, it's probably approaching 10 years ago now. I think it was called "CRM: The Train That's Coming At You." BLAIR: CRM as a customer relationship management software was becoming more prevalent and powerful, it's driven by the internet changing the way people buy, and the way we sell, and the way we use marketing automation. The biggest way sales and marketing has changed in the era of Google is that lead generation has moved from a sales function to a marketing function. When that happens, that changes the nature of what selling is, and it changes the nature a little bit of what marketing is. One of the implications is actually sales and marketing in your client's organizations are getting closer and closer together, and they're overlapping. That article I wrote about CRM was that the CRM application is actually the place in your client's organization ... and I know it's not an application, isn't really a place. But it's the place where sales and marketing are overlapping. BLAIR: Even pre-CRM days when I was working in the agency business, I as somebody who comes from the world of sales, I always felt like in a new b