What happens when you hit every KPI and the team still burns out? This one cuts into the tension inside agency planning: the difference between what you measure and what actually drives results. Host Grant Hultgren sits down with co-host Kurt Schmidt for a direct, sometimes dry, look at the unsexy work of leading ops when old-school KPIs no longer tell the whole story. They dig into the trap of benchmarking blindly, what management consistency really means, and how top teams are experimenting with incentives and org design. Real examples, not theory. If you’re tired of grading yourself on metrics that don’t move the needle, this episode spells out what to measure, what to ignore, and why your planning layer matters more than ever.

WHAT YOU'LL HEAR

• Why margin comparisons and classic KPIs often backfire when planning for agency growth.
• The difference between management consistency and micromanagement, and why most ops leaders get it wrong.
• How incentive models are evolving as agencies move from billable hours to retainers and outcomes.
• The big risk of optimizing output at the cost of engagement and retention.
• Actionable methods for aligning teams behind metrics that actually fit your business.

TIMESTAMPS 00:00 | Cold open 00:10 | Intro 00:20 | Co-host intro: Kurt Schmidt 01:17 | Are KPIs still useful? 02:00 | How most agency leaders set metrics 03:04 | The accidental path to agency ops 05:03 | Why classic metrics miss the mark 07:10 | Untaught skills and leading up 08:29 | Building your own success framework 10:21 | Parallax mid-roll 11:00 | The myth of good communication 12:04 | Consistency in management 13:49 | Communication and expectations post-COVID 15:59 | Team performance: focus and laggards 16:35 | When to hire, when to fire 17:12 | Why middle management is burned out 18:20 | Defining success and incentives in 2024 20:16 | Changing value models and performance culture 21:42 | How teams are experimenting with incentives 22:30 | The new value of "unlimited tokens" 23:21 | The struggle to measure value 24:23 | Outro and next episode preview 24:40 | Closing

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE Parallax, Deltek, Promethean, McKinsey, Gallup, Gartner, Jeff Matlow, NASA, Oppenheimer, Anthropic

SUBSCRIBE AND LEARN MORE Billable publishes every other Wednesday. Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. More from Parallax: https://getparallax.com

What do you actually know about the teams pitching you today? And can you trust the work you see when so much of agency sales now starts with AI-generated content? This episode is about the trust recession in agency operations: why buyers are more skeptical, why sales cycles have more stakeholders, and what transparency really looks like when AI slop is flooding inboxes. Grant Hultgren and co-host Kurt Schmidt (agency ops coach, former CEO/COO) compare notes on shifts in buyer behavior (hint: clients show up more prepared, but more confused), the end of the siloed sales-to-delivery handoff, and why most “AI enablement” is really a culture problem. Want to hear why most of your clients get to 80% without you, or how the best teams share what’s actually working with AI on the floor? That’s here.

WHAT YOU'LL HEAR

• Why agency buyers now do 80% of research before ever reaching out.
• What changes when every sales pitch triggers skepticism about AI and authenticity.
• How siloed processes break down as AI impacts both sales and delivery.
• Why teams sharing their actual AI use cases beats top-down mandates every time.
• The unglamorous reality of trust-building, transparency, and post-COVID buyer committees.

TIMESTAMPS 00:00 | Cold open 00:46 | Intro 01:02 | Meet Kurt Schmidt 01:25 | Industry pulse check 01:58 | The trust recession and AI 03:14 | Research-heavy clients 04:20 | Buyer readiness and confusion 06:14 | Transparency and sales enablement 08:10 | AI disruptions across agency functions 09:17 | Culture, silos, and operations 12:13 | Selling to bigger buying committees 13:18 | The sales-delivery wall is gone 14:48 | Speed and prototyping in sales 15:56 | New patterns in delivery and engagement 17:09 | Understanding the client environment 18:18 | Prototyping, sales cycles, and skills 19:16 | Shifts inside agency teams 21:08 | Self-reporting and knowledge sharing 22:04 | Ownership and pride in agencies 23:39 | Teaching across disciplines with AI 24:14 | Isolation, learning, and industry silos 26:27 | The networking gap 27:23 | Building bridges inside teams 29:14 | Consistency, urgency, and mental health 31:49 | Outro

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE Kurt Schmidt Consulting, getparallax.com, Claude, Google Gemini, Opus, HubSpot, Jira, Salesforce, Replit, Lovable, The Little Book of Networking, Bureau of Digital, Soda, SOC 2, Langsmith, LangChain, project management RACI, AI prompt sequences.

SUBSCRIBE AND LEARN MORE Billable publishes every other Wednesday. Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. More from Parallax: https://getparallax.com