Is your leadership style genuine and sincere? Do you have empathy where your team is concerned? Do your clients display empathy for their end-users? When Lonn Shulkin first started working at Bam Strategy, they had just lost their biggest client and were in the process of pivoting and taking the opportunity to shift their focus to find their ideal customer. Eleven years later, Lonn is now the CEO  at Bam Strategy and is dedicated to motivating consumer behavior through strategy, media, platforms, and creative initiatives. He sat down with Jason to discuss how they went from losing their biggest client to getting to eight figures, how they started building their sales team, and how empathy has helped them increase client and employee retention. 3 Golden Nuggets Building their sales team. Losing a client that represented 70% of their business meant the agency had to find a way to pivot and use that experience with a global client to diversify. After realizing what they were great at, they got specific on who their perfect audience was and then focused on the business development side to build the sales team around that. Investing in leadership. This agency has been able to improve its employee retention by understanding that each individual employee needed the time and attention and the effort from them to understand their role in the company. They worked to create an honest relationship where an employee could go to them if they had other job offers and give them a chance to discuss why they should stay. They also started doing more social activities as a group to create bonds and created leadership programs to start building up their leadership practice. Putting in that work results in a culture fit that permeates to all employees. Teaching their clients empathy. Just like they built employee retention and loyalty by implementing empathy into their company culture, Lonn says they now try to extend that concept to clients to teach them how to care about their customers in the same way. It’s been a big driver of growth and success caring about the end-user in the same way because that's what creates brand loyalty today. Sponsors and Resources Verblio: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by Verblio. Check out Verblio.com/smartagency and get 50% off your first month of content creation. Our team loves using Verblio because of the ease in their process and their large pool of crowd-sourced writers. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Grow Your Agency & Increase Employee Retention Through Empathy {These transcripts have been auto-generated. While largely accurate, they may contain some errors.} Jason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? Jason Swenk here, and I have another amazing guest who has grown an eight-figure agency, very, very profitable. Done it through amazing team, amazing systems and done it with empathy. And so let's go ahead and get into the show. Hey, Lonn. Welcome to the show. Lonn: [00:00:28] How's it going? Great to be here. Thank you for having me. Jason: [00:00:31] Yeah, man. Uh, so tell us who you are and what do you do? Lonn: [00:00:34] Uh, so Lonn Shulkin. I am CEO at Bam Strategy. Been with the agency for 11 or so years, and just very passionate about growing teams and certainly what we do, which is working as an agency with pretty large customers bring brands that you would know that really focuses on digital experience. So not necessarily the UX stuff, but how we can actually engage customers and communicate with them on a one-to-one basis. Jason: [00:01:05] Awesome. Tell us kind of the progression or the different cycles that Bam has actually gone through in the past… I guess two decades. Lonn: [00:01:14] Yeah, it’s quite the ride. I'm sure it's a common ride as a, as I've heard from other guests on your show. But, um, when I joined 11 or so years ago, we had that, that one really big flagship client was taken up 60 or 70