Fixing the way to leadership

Mo Dhaliwal 00:27

Welcome to High Agency, igniting conversations with inspiring people, leading transformative change. Every week, we lose countless hours to the digital equivalent of paperwork. Copy-pasting between spreadsheets, duplicating efforts across teams, and manually tacking projects. It's death by a thousand keystrokes.Yet, we're all racing to adopt AI with so many organizations that are exploring the artificial intelligence to transform their workflows. And the paradox? While they're investing in tomorrow's technology, we're all still struggling with yesterday's processes. Amongst advertising and creative agencies, the numbers are huge and fascinating. Global ad spend just cracked a trillion dollars last year. The Omnicom Interpublic merger was a staggering $13 billion deal. And all of that is reshaping the entire industry landscape.But here's what's keeping agency leaders up at night. Most of us still can't figure out how to measure AI's actual return on investment. And frankly, we can't tell if technology is making anybody more productive. We know that transformation is essential, but figuring it out and quantifying its value remains elusive.So the real revolution isn't just about adopting new tech. It's about fundamentally rethinking how agencies operate. From consolidating bloated tech stacks to reimagining client workflows, the most successful groups are those that are mastering the art of systematic change. So today, we're joined by Harv Negra. He's the head of brand communications at Scoro, the work management platform. Harv has spent years in the trenches of agency operations, witnessing firsthand how the right systems can transform business efficiency. He's previously group operations director at a pan European marketing consultancy. He brings structure and clarity to scaling businesses. And he's a Vancouver native who's now based in London. Harv hosts The Handbook, the operations podcast, interviewing industry leaders about business maturity and sustainable growth. And his mission is transforming operations from support function to strategic advantage, helping creative and professional services businesses achieve operational excellence through innovative frameworks and authentic brand narratives.Welcome, Harv. 

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Harv Nagra 02:50

Thank you so much. Nice to be here. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 02:52

I'm so glad you're here. And actually, as we start, I'm going to tell a little story. And I promise the podcast is about you. But I think it's just curious and kind of funny how we arrived here, because I had discovered you on LinkedIn some time ago. My agency, Skyrocket had even looked at Scoro a number of years ago as a way of improving our processes. And at the time, you know, realization for us was that it wasn't just a process issue, it was actually like a culture and people issue that we had to like solve first. But that's what I learned about Scoro. Eventually, that's how I learned about you, we learned about The Handbook, started following your podcast, and I would send links to some of your posts and your podcasts to my Managing Director and be like, "You got to watch this." "Listen to this." This is good." And then, like a month ago, maybe more, I was wandering around Punjabi Market here in Vancouver, listening to poetry and spoken word from a variety of intergenerational artists. And it was a great day. It was an event put on by the Indian Summer Festival and in partnership with the Punjabi Market Collective out here. And I see this guy wandering around with a very recognizable like moustache and beard going on. And I'm like, I have seen this face somewhere. And I was doing this creepy, creepy thing where I was like, looking at you, but trying not to make it obvious I was looking at you and I just couldn't place you. 

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Harv Nagra 04:15

Yeah. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 04:16

And it wasn't until I left that day. And I think later on that night, it like struck me that I think this is the Operations guy. And I went on LinkedIn and sure enough, it was you I reached out. And I just at the time, I wasn't able to put two and two together because I understood you from London, from Scoro, totally different context. I didn't even know that you were from the community or from before. So for me, it was a bit of worlds colliding because I didn't expect to see The Handbook Guy from Scoro at Punjabi Market in Vancouver. 

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Harv Nagra 04:47

Exactly. I've had the opportunity to be, well, I've been traveling around for a few months now, but yeah, small world, you know, you've, I think, interviewed one of my really good friends, Joanna Lee on the podcast.Yes. I think you've heard of my sister, Jag Nagra 

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Mo Dhaliwal 05:05

The artist in Vancouver. Yes. 

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Harv Nagra 05:06

Yes, exactly. So there's a lot of layers and connections there. But yeah, that's, I was surprised that you saw me there, but super cool as well. So that's great. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 05:16

Yeah. Um, and so, I mean, you've had a lot of experience, uh, running operations at various agencies. Um, but before we get to that, I want to talk a little bit about growing up in Vancouver. Uh, that's interesting to me because you're from here. Um, and I want to learn about what life was like before you got into operations because I'm not sure. And I think you would agree that not everybody necessarily knows they're going to get into operations at some point in life. Um, and so something led you down that road, but that road started here. 

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Harv Nagra 05:50

Yeah, I grew up in Maple Ridge and the suburbs and I think I was always probably a little bit of a control freak, maybe growing up in a household with one too many people, it was just like my way of creating order was just like I need to tidy things and keep things in order, right? So those were the maybe early seeds of something there.And then I kind of studied at SEAT, SFU Surrey, so that was the School of Interactive Arts and Technology, so very kind of mixed design kind of studies. And I graduated from that being like, okay, I can do a bit of everything, but I don't know what I specialize in, this is, it was a bit confusing because it's like, okay, I've dabbled in everything and I can do a bit of everything, but what am I really good at? And I felt like it was nothing, so that was a new great place to kind of start, like finish your university degree. So I went to BCIT and did a bit of marketing training here, got a couple of certifications under my belt and that's how I started my career in kind of the design and marketing space.And one of my earliest jobs was actually just around the corner from here in Gastown on Water Street, it was a boutique youth market research agency called The Sound Research. So I was employee number four and I got right off the bat, like right at the beginning of my career, the opportunity to work for clients like MTV, Jim Beam, Puma Nike and stuff like that. So really, really cool. It was kind of a project manager slash design role, but yeah, so project management was always there.And I always think that project management is kind of like, not that it can't be a destination in itself, but often for ops people, sometimes I see that that's where they started. I'm rambling too much maybe. Not at all. No? So yeah, that's how I got my start. And then always kind of moving between project management and digital marketing roles is what I was doing in Vancouver. And you know, at some point I got a bit frustrated with the job market here. It was earlier in my career and I felt like maybe there wasn't enough opportunities and it was just very competitive as a result of that.So I decided to go to London in the UK and I've been there for 13 years. So again, my path there has been kind of producer. I was a producer and then I moved into a digital director at an agency and that's around the time where I just started taking control of stuff. One of the things I talk about a lot more is business maturity and this business was not very mature and it was just a bit chaotic in the way things were done there sometimes.New starters coming in, being sat at an iMac with like 300 files on the desktop and I would just think like, that is a horrible way for somebody to have their first day. You know what, I'm just going to take control of this. And I started setting up people's computers for their first day, things like that, taking control of like the dodgy internet connection, just being like, I'm just going to upgrade it because nobody else is taking care of it. 

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Harv Nagra 09:08

So in fact, I think that was even before the digital director role. It was as digital producer. I just started getting involved in that kind of stuff and it was like, let me sort this out. So those were the early signs for me that this is the stuff I really enjoy doing.There's just fixing stuff. That's the thing. There's just this desire to source it out. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 09:27

Yeah, I mean I have to relate that back to what you shared with like your, you know, early childhood growing up in Maple Ridge first You know, I'm imagining immigrant Multifamily multi-generation household. All right tick that box. Yeah And if you're trying to project manage that yes. Yeah, exactly.Then there's something definitely speaking from from deep down that says, you know, I want to solve problems and make things work better, right and You know, there's an interesting thing within that with this whole idea of agency, right? I mean the podcast is called high agency But the idea of solving the problems that you see you're not waiting for permission. You're moving to make things happen because even a project management I am quite sure that There's probably a lot of operations people that got their start in project management But not necessarily a lot of project managers and project managers that necessarily went into operations Right because we've had the experience on both where we've had project managers that quite static and you know wanted to kind of push things around and keep things there and would be happy to actually run things and Inefficient and messy spreadsheets for the rest of their lives because that's just how they do it and then we've had project managers that actually were really high agency and We're looking at process and trying to advance things and coaching and looking at how we came together to to make things happen Yeah, and so for what you're describing is definitely the latter Because what you're equating to business maturity is really that right of having somebody that can come in and solve problem solve problems before being asked to But you mentioned that you talk a lot about business maturity like how do you define it? Like is it just messiness because there's I think plenty of businesses that if you talk to them They would think they're plenty mature because they've been around growing. They're successful. Yeah, so how do you define business maturity? 

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Harv Nagra 11:15

Yeah, I think it has nothing to do with years under your belt, nothing to do with revenue, and nothing to do with head counts. I think it's really other indicators.When I was first moving into Ops, I started working for – we had just hired a kind of external COO, like an interim COO, and I started working under him. And he's the first one that brought it to my attention saying, go look at this business maturity model and tell me what you think we're at. And that was interesting, first of all, because I'd never come across a business maturity model before. And the second thing is that it became such an interesting idea for me, or just such a revelation because just at a quick glance by reading what some of these definitions are for the stages, business maturity models, there's one for like every industry. They tend to have five stages, and going from like complete – I call it the chaotic era on one side, which is just like you're in startup mode and everyone's just making stuff up, all the way to like the other end, level five, which is like focusing on innovation because everything is running like clockwork and it's super measured and excellence all around, right? So yeah, once I discovered that, looked at it and reflected on it, I was like, this just gives you so much clarity about how you're running and what the next step should be for you to aspire towards.And I've loved it so much that I host a podcast like you were saying in the intro. That's the overarching theme for the podcast is I like to think of it as business maturity and all the episodes kind of fit into one of the buckets underneath it. And in fact, by the time this podcast goes live, I think in the next two weeks actually, I'm launching a business maturity quiz on the Scoro website. So somebody can go answer, I think it's 25 questions, it takes three minutes, and you get a really nice indicator of where you're at in terms of your own business maturity and what you should do to get to the next level. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 13:33

I'm going to play the devil's advocate on purpose. I promise I like operations. I promise I'm on your side. But I'm just hearing the voices I've heard over the course of so many years.But we work in creative spaces. If we have too much process, that's going to constrict our thinking. And we need to be able to improvise. And a lot of innovation is not knowing what to do and figuring it out as you go. So it's one thing to, I think, take the quiz, get the metric of maturity and where you sit, and then maybe even introduce process and tools. How do you convince people? How do you actually shape a team and say, OK, we've got to move in this direction? 

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Harv Nagra 14:12

Yeah, I think some of these decisions are not, they're not negative, you know, that level one I'm talking about is there's nothing documented. You have no best practice. Everyone's using their own assortment of tools, downloading whatever they want from the internet and stuff like that. And somebody might be managing their projects in a notebook, other people might be using Apple Notes, other people might be using like whatever Asana and stuff like that. And to a degree, that works.But you know, if you're, and I think it works for a certain headcount, this kind of messiness and stuff like that. But the bigger you get your projects get more complicated, your client budgets get bigger, and the increased headcounts also mean that there's more complexity in your organization. And I don't think it's so hard to convince people, because they will start recognizing their pains, the pains and recognizing that this is a chaotic place to work where you never have the answers you need, you never have the resources you need, and frustration. And I know that because I've been in that situation myself where it's like, this is just like Mickey Mouse where we're not running a grown up business. Everyone's just constantly firefighting. So I don't think it's that difficult to convince people because they will already know that this is not a place they might want to be building their careers. I think if it's staying in that chaotic stage way too long. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 15:42

Yeah. Yeah.I mean, I think some people do get used to the pain of it. And also, I think especially in creative spaces, sometimes you attract personalities where their strong suits are actually having a high degree of comfort and ambiguity and being incredible in a crisis, right? And so between those two, like freaking superpowers, they're able to kind of figure it out and actually not just figure it out, but make things look good in a lot of situations, right? But there isn't a lot of incentive to remove ambiguity or to perhaps reduce the amount of crises that are happening and recurring all the time. 

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Harv Nagra 16:20

Yeah, I think for those people that might be enjoying it, that's one thing. But to think that everyone else is enjoying that or the people that are actually executing the work are enjoying that or if they're existing in anxiety all the time, that's not fair and that's not going to result in people sticking around.And I think for the like the CEOs, the MDs, the founders, the, you know, the finest directors and the ops director, for those individuals, I think what they need to do is help their businesses or their employees understand what profitability means. I think it's one thing for a creative or somebody to say that this is my process and I exist in this kind of messy space and I thrive in it. But what they might not be looking at is the lens that we're here to make money for the business. And that's how you get a pay rise for yourself and job security and a cool office and nice perks. And so I think those people that I mentioned, those senior leaders, have to do a better job of educating their teams that we need to run a tight ship and ensure what we're doing is profitable so that we can hire more people, have a great office in the middle of the city or, you know, be having the annual summits and parties and stuff like that. So I think that's super important. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 17:42

Yeah, so you're really speaking to, like, leadership creating alignment, so people understand what they're there to do, which sounds like it would be obvious, but often isn't. And it's not even just always creative spaces.Like I've worked with software developers in the past, where I think we were missing that clarity internally. And I remember having this conversation with one dev once, an incredibly talented person, like a 10x developer, and was arguing with them to build the thing that the client was paying us to build. And they were like, but that's not it. We've got to build this solution. And I was like, but that's not the solution we want. He's like, well, you know, maybe in the future, we need to really define what our solution is and what the client solution is. And I was so confused because I was like, there is only the client solution. If you're building something outside of that, that's a hobby. Like we're not being paid to do that. How could you possibly? And at the time, it took me some time to actually realize that like, oh, you know, we actually got to get clarity around outcomes and the fact that our jobs are actually tied to clients, we're not. 

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Harv Nagra 18:45

I think of that that reminds me of an example like you know I've got friends that are creatives and stuff like that and you know even my past agency there was one when it came to pitches is like I remember some of the creatives like going completely unbound and just being like this is my opportunity to like have the wildest canvas and things like that and it's like first of all we're not getting paid for this so you spending hundreds of hours on this thing on this free pitch is not on secondly the client probably doesn't have budget for that magical thing you're showing them so why are we even putting that in front of them because then they're gonna try to squeeze that into like a 20k budget which is just not gonna be possible right so I think people need to remember what we're again what we're here to do and yeah time is absolutely critical to be tracking yeah times money yeah

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Mo Dhaliwal 19:48

Yeah, on the change management piece, I just saw something recently that was quite interesting to me that was kind of putting into reality how change happens and how we respond to change. And I have been for too long in the mindset, I think as a default, that change was a result of analysis, right, that we're going to provide an analysis, collectively we'll think about it and then change will happen. And then we'd also actually become frustrated that whether it was process or something else of how long it would take for a change to actually really take hold or sometimes not even take hold, right, of just, you know, we've communicated the idea, the analysis was presented, team was asked to think about it and then just change is going to happen, right?And then the other side of it was this idea that actually what we do is we see things as humans and if we witness something and it makes us feel something, that those feelings are then going to drive change. And for me, it's like a totally different way of thinking about it and not one that I was incredibly used to when it came to the internal work. When it comes to a client, when it comes to a campaign, absolutely all, like, you know, all I'm ever talking to clients about is we're not communicating information, we're communicating emotion, right? So, we've got it, no problem. That's 90% of the conversation all the time. Yeah. But when it came to process, I somehow thought this is going to be different in some way. We're all still human and we're still only going to respond to things that, you know, touch the emotion first.So, you know, how do you show people the thing that is going to make them feel something so that they change? Yeah. 

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Harv Nagra 21:31

I've been, I've tried making changes that were what I thought were small and those ones I handled probably the most carelessly and those ones always failed. And then I always got surprised because I'm like, Oh, I thought that was easy and no one would care. But I mean, I really didn't care because it was like, well, you didn't like, you didn't nurture that, that change.So, yeah, I think storytelling has so much to do with it and like that links up with what you're saying about emotion, right? I think you just need to start communicating really early in my view and you need everybody, everybody in your management team, for example, speaking the same language from their own perspectives and the benefits from their point of view and stuff like that. But I think right off the bat, you need to be totally joined up and answering the questions like what do we need to change? Why do we need to change it? What's going to be in it for all of us and what's going to be in it for you? And I think if you start answering those questions and you're super transparent about it, then people understand the justification, right? People react badly when they're in the dark and it's a surprise and then it's like, well, I don't know why we're doing this and I'm not on board and people dig in their heels, right? When you mentioned the change process, there's this kind of Kubler-Ross change curve and it was originally designed to show the stages of grief somebody goes through when a loved one passes away, the bereavement process. But it's been adopted by the business world because those are the same stages of grief people go through when dealing with change in the work environment. So I'm not going to get the order right, but things like shock, anger, sadness, denial, and then finally just kind of reconciling them to the fact and then slowly acclimatizing themselves to it and then being fine with the change. But ultimately that's what you're going to be facing, you know, and no matter what you do, those are still going to be the stages. But as like ops leaders or agency leaders or business leaders, there's stuff we can do to make that land as best as possible. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 24:03

What's the most challenging thing you ever dealt with? Because I think, you know, looking back on it now, you've probably established a lot of your own best practices
about how to implement best practices. But when you were first kind of making the transition from project management into this kind of operation space, I think it's one thing when you're a soul player, right? And that lone wolf that sees things, you're just kind of like fixing things up and like plugging holes and what have you. But when it's a little bit more on the business infrastructure and the architectural level of the business, you know, what were some of the first challenges that you encountered where you learned some of these lessons? 

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Harv Nagra 24:41

I think what comes to mind is that when I had this innate tendency to want to fix stuff and keep stuff in order. When I joined this agency, it was a very small digital team that I sat in and things were just very messy. I was like, I'm going to take control of this and sort out our processes. We're going to use this system. This is how we're going to run projects. This is how we're going to do our weekly stand-ups and stuff like that. Looking outside at the wider agency, it was like, okay, everyone else is much more chaotic. That's what I call stage two of the maturity model that I speak about, the glimmers of growth. You get pockets of best practice in different teams and stuff like that, but it's not centralized across the organization, and there's not a lot of documentation there still. That is what I'd say was the biggest challenge.Just a quick example, that agency I worked at, we had decided that we needed to bring in a professional services automation platform. This is quite a long time ago. Before that, we were using stuff like Harvest to create budgets. I think a handful of people would timesheet, which is like, what's the point if not everyone's going to do it? Budgets were being reconciled in Google Sheets manually, and they were not accurate at all. We also had multiple entities in different countries. They each had their own Harvest entities. For me to log time on that entity's project, I would have to log into their Harvest account. We were already tracking time on our own, or tracking budgets on our own. To be collaborating across borders like that, it was just absolutely a mess. The point of all this is to say that I got control over my team, but there was this monumental effort going to be involved in getting everyone else to see things the same way, where they've been used to a very loose, very chaotic process. That's something we had to manage. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 27:05

That's exactly what I was going to ask you. How did you pull it off? How do you get people to realize it? 

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Harv Nagra 27:13

That was before I moved into operations, right? So I was still kind of in this digital director role, I think, and, and I think, you know, like, just intuitively, I knew that if I tried to push this, or the finance director tried to push this, it was not going to go as far. So I had a close relationship with our CEO. And I was like, you know what, the first person that needs to say anything is you. And I'm going to draft what you need to say to everyone in an all hands, and the message you need to send afterwards. So it was like that. So the he's saying this, and he's communicating it. And then the rest of us were reinforcing that message. And also, like I was saying a few minutes ago, like he was emphasizing why we wanted to grow, we wanted to succeed in our next stage, you know, our next decade, and we wanted to be profitable. And we wanted the sexy offices, and the big parties and pay rises, pay raises, as we say here. And, and it's not possible if we're flying blind, right? So all of it came down to communication.And then the the process, I think, myself and that finance director did a huge amount of work in getting the foundations right and making sure everything was configured. And then training was handled very kind of in a very thorough way as well, like full, because it was such a big change for us, we took out two days for anyone in project or account management to really go through all the processes on their screens, follow along and had somebody there kind of leading that training, so that they knew how and then they had the resources to learn or reference. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 29:12

But it really started with the leader of the company aligning incentives. I mean, like, here's how it matters and here's how it's going to impact. I mean, I don't mind confessing this now because I feel like I've kind of come through.But the realization, the innate realization that you had, which was that if I try to push this, it's not going to fly. I always have the opposite one. Like there was companies I worked at where I was like, like junior as junior could be. And I was so sure that if I scream loud enough, I can just rewrite this whole thing and it's going to be better and faster and what have you. And you realize pretty quickly, I realized very slowly, but I imagine most people would realize very quickly that change doesn't happen with one person on the margins screaming at everybody else. 

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Harv Nagra 29:59

And, you know, again, going back to that thing about, like, starting at this agency as producer and just volunteering to fix things, right? I think, you know, we all complain about our jobs and, like, our workplaces and stuff like that, right? I was, it was early in my time in the UK, and I was on a visa. So I also knew that I was stuck in this job because, like, moving jobs is going to be really difficult because you have to jump through so many hoops.And there's a very, in a very big market, there's a much smaller market that has the infrastructure to hire people on visas, right? So it was like, okay, moving jobs is going to be really hard. So, you know, I could be one of the people complaining and moaning about it, just like you're saying, but that's not going to sort anything out. So if I really want this, if I'm going to be stuck here for a number of years, I might as well fix that nagging thing that no one else is going to take care of. So at least I don't have something to complain about. And that was, I wonder if that hadn't happened, if I wouldn't have gone into ops, because then I would have just jumped ship and gone somewhere else, you know, but I just had to fix things because I was stuck there. So it actually worked out well for me. Yeah. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 31:13

Yeah, and look, I'm sure there's plenty of people that would have taken the third option, which was not fix anything, not jump ship, and just continue to suffer, hopefully. 

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Harv Nagra 31:24

I just have no patience for that. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 31:27

And what do you see in businesses today that whether it's managing people or work or however the work management happens, that they continue to get wrong and
that surprises you? I'm sure whether it's score or whether it's best practices and helping to shape culture, there's probably a lot that you're able to quite predictably go into a company and say, okay, here's what we've improved.But is there anything that emerges that you just keep looking at and you're like, wow, businesses still aren't getting this right and it still continues to surprise you? 

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Harv Nagra 32:00

I think one of those things is the the kind of the volume of distractions we have is one major one for me and I struggled this for a very long time and in fact it was when I started this new job at Scoro in March 2024 they had some really interesting working practices that I was exposed to when I started and one of those was a very very strong recommendation that you should have do not disturb on all your devices all the time that's your personal phone on your work laptop and I was shocked by that I'm like how am I gonna respond to my co-workers questions if everything's on do not disturb but the point was like you know if you don't have do not disturb on your phone you're gonna have Instagram messages YouTube pings something new on Netflix like your partner messaged you about what's for dinner tonight or whatever breaking news cuz don't Trump tweeted something and it's just like endless distractions on your phone that you don't need to know first of all right and probably some spam calls that you don't want to take anyway and then your on your work I used to find that every time an email came in from a client whatever I was working on it'd be like oh notification in the corner my screen I'm gonna go look at that or then slack message or like and how many slack messages are about like oh happy birthday or like jokes and stuff like that right so those are distractions and there's something like um I think research says that like we're distracted from what we're doing once every eight minutes or something like that if I'm mistaken and it takes us 20 minutes to get our focus back we only have a eight hour day so when I think about that I'm like oh my god so every eight minutes you're distracted it takes 20 minutes to get back on schedule that's a half an hour gone right out of an eight hour day so you're not getting very much done so I would say that is one that I would really recommend people do is just try to create an environment for focus and block out your calendar for what you want to work on so you actually get it done because um and I'm not saying I am perfect these are things I've learned to adopt and I used to be constantly just firefighting and answering notifications all the time maybe not the ones on my phone but certainly the one the slack messages and like there's never a message that is like the world's ending this needs to be answered now yeah

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Mo Dhaliwal 34:40

Yeah, very rarely. I mean, it's not even firefighting because with those of us that, you know, have some amount of ADHD that they're dealing with, it's not firefighting. It's actually like eating candy, right? It's like, yeah, you know, and I'm still horrible at it and I've struggled with it and my coping mechanism is the blocks of calendar time where I've got three hours blocked to just focus on something.Yeah. And I know that out of that, I'm going to get about an hour and a half out of it up. Just that's going to be pure. Yeah. It takes me a long time to get in and then it takes me a while to get out. But the emails, the reactiveness, you know, those are just amazing little dopamine hits. That just makes you feel so effective for having done this 30 second task and done like 400 of them in a row. So it is really difficult. And so you're continuing to see businesses that are paying no attention to distraction management. 

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Harv Nagra 35:32

I don't know if many people I'm not aware of that many people talking about distraction management, first of all. So yeah, certainly, I'd be surprised because I it's not something I hear about.And I've worked in places where this is not a factor. And everyone is just constantly answering the latest thing. So just constantly like, you're pretending that you're multitasking, but you're really doing slivers of like 10 second bits of work. And like, at the end of the day, I just remember feeling really defeated, being like, I didn't achieve anything today. Right. And that was why. Because it was just spending all day answering messages and emails and having little tiny windows where I actually got stuff done. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 36:20

Maybe we're in our own bubble here at Skyrocket, but I know that for me and in some of my circles, we do spend some time talking about distraction management and about notifications and about reducing complexity. But for me, it was mostly because I was introduced to this system called Groundwork by a friend and colleague named Amrita Ujah. And this was probably a decade ago, was the first time she really got me into my calendar, into planning to that level, and also looking at reducing the noise of notifications, because I had just taken her for the norm. Everything's blowing up all the time, and I don't know what I'm doing when, and that's called work. And you just do that day in, day out until you die. And so she kind of opened up my imagination to a different way of being, and then slowly I kind of started to manage myself a little bit better.And then I think try to encourage other people too. Excellent. But these days I think we're on the right track at Skyrocket, but some of our clients that we work with are a different story. And our work tends to kind of go beyond marketing, right? Because when we're talking about brand marketing and we're working with companies in B2B spaces especially, we wind up taking a pretty wide mandate. So it will be like internal brand, which is really a lot of the company culture to brand experience and then some of it to marketing. And we have to, by definition, actually work on the culture of the company as well, right? And work on what their internal operations look like. We're not getting to the point of KPI's and ROI, that's still them. But at least getting to the point of cleaning up the operations enough so that people can focus on our work together even, that they can be a good client to us and as a result get the most out of us and the work that we're doing together.And I'm just thinking about one scenario in particular where we've got a client that's been in business for a couple of decades. So functionally successful, but you look at the way they're working, and I'm obviously not naming names here, but you look at the way they're working and I'd probably put them pretty low on the maturity scale because you have committed people that are actually really passionate. But everything is a challenge. We haven't asked for so much as a login or an account or a document that didn't require pinging and confusion and trying to surface stuff to get it to us, right? And so we've been trying to work with them, and again, we're an agency, right? We've been trying to work with them to be like, hey, if we clean this up internally, like my God, you'll be getting more out of us, let alone improving your own lives. But we're met with a lot of sort of personality challenges, right, where people think we're being hard on people, but we're trying to be hard on process and say it's just a process thing, right? This isn't personal, we're not trying to offend anybody. What advice would you have for us? Because again, we're not part of the organization completely, right? We're not staff, but we have their best interests at heart, and we're trying to coach and shape them. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 39:22

Yeah. Yeah, what advice would you have for us to go into that situation? 

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Harv Nagra 39:27

Well, it sounds like you're doing some of the right things, but I'd say onboarding is such an important piece where you get the opportunity to go into maybe the client's office and, or whatever we do these days, Zoom or whatever, and laying out the foundations for how you're gonna be collaborating together. This is what you're paying us for.These are the outcomes you're expecting, but this is how we're gonna collaborate. This is when we're gonna have check-ins. This is how we're gonna share updates with you. These are the tools we're gonna be using, and this is how we're gonna communicate and expect changes and revisions and stuff like that. So I think if you do that kind of onboarding, you make sure that everyone's informed and aware, and then you're right, that you're still gonna face some resistance in people that are not used to working that way, or that can get away with whatever with your competition and stuff like that. But I think just gently nudging them back towards that process. And at some point, I think you also learn who's not a right fit for you because they never wanna adapt and they never see the benefits because they're so resistant to it. And maybe that's a sign that you're not a good fit. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 40:48

Yeah, I mean, I think that's in some ways an easier determination to make when you're kind of working on an internal team. Yeah.It's hard to kind of come in as a, as an agency and be like, Hey, a bad guy. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe, you know, should be on the way out. 

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Harv Nagra 41:04

Well, I mean like less about like that guy needs to be fired, but some of that whole client account maybe is not a fit, is what I'm trying to say, right? At some point, you might make that decision that they, the way they want to work and what they expect is not going to be result in us having a happy team, nor making any money on this project.And if you're not making any money on it, then why, why are you, why are you collaborating? Yeah. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 41:33

What are you seeing as being the next level of development for operations as a field in business and in agencies? 

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Harv Nagra 41:45

That's a really good question. I was just on LinkedIn yesterday commenting on her friend's post. Her name is Freia Muehlenbein, and she's kind of an ops and agency consultant as well. And I think she had just been on a podcast herself talking about how agencies often don't have kind of a strategic operations person. If they have an ops person all, they're very lucky sometimes.I think it's becoming much more common these days to have somebody responsible for ops. But often that ends up being a very tactical role where you're doing a huge array of things and not being particularly strategic. And what her point was that you have a vision and you often have a strategy for the year. And when you let it on autopilot, it just doesn't happen because there's nobody kind of owning that change. And that's something I kind of talk about on my podcast as well, is a lot of the guests have talked about strategic operations and how operations is really the kind of the driver for agency growth and success and performance really. So I think that's where we need to start seeing operations and our roles is really kind of strategic in driving and realizing the mission of the business and the success of the business, rather than just looking at ourselves as kind of jack of all trades and just there to patch holes or fight fires. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 43:27

Yeah, I mean, that's a seismic shift from just being like the fixers of things, right? Like, saw something broken, fixed it, but moving beyond that too, let's set a direction and strategy and a way of doing things that transcends that.What are you excited about personally? What's next for Mr. Nagra? 

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Harv Nagra 43:49

What's next for me? So I've been in this like really interesting role with Scoro as Head of Brand Comms, and I've got to work on this podcast. So that's been really exciting.And I've had a lot of personal growth through this role as well. Like things, I've been doing things that I was terrified of doing, speaking on stage, interviewing really, really smart people. I mean, being interviewed used to terrify me as well. So I'm doing all those things that used to terrify me. And I think I'm getting to do some really interesting things as well as some other initiatives beyond the podcast. Like I said, we're launching this business maturity quiz in a couple of weeks, which is going to be quite an exciting campaign. And yeah, hoping to just kind of take that message further and who knows what the future holds really. But yeah, it's been quite a fun 15 months or so, so far. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 44:51

Yeah. So, if people want to learn more about what you're up to, learn more about the podcast, we're going to be somewhere. 

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Harv Nagra 44:58

Find me on LinkedIn. So it's linkedin.com slash 'in' slash Harv Nagra. So please connect with me there and look at the podcast.That's where you get to hear me
speaking every couple of weeks with some really brilliant guests talking about kind of business maturity and business ops. So it's The Handbook, The Operations Podcast on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

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Mo Dhaliwal 45:25

Awesome. Well, thanks for coming in, Harv. We appreciate it.Thank you for having me. Well, hopefully we've given you a lot to think about. That was High Agency.
Like and subscribe, and we will see you next time.

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