Amber Kemmis is the Chief Operating Officer of Revenue River, a sales and marketing agency. With over a decade of digital marketing and agency leadership experience, Amber can solve almost any problem thrown her way. She also has a passion for people, psychology, MarTech, and driving revenue growth.
Amber has worked in-house and agency side to gain experience in managing teams, sales and marketing alignment, brand strategy, HubSpot, website management, and overall digital marketing across a wide range of industries, including healthcare, SaaS, technology, L&D, manufacturing, and professional services.
Topics discussed in the episode:
- The Difference between a Traditional HubSpot Agency vs. HubSpot Agency Today.
- What is a Traditional HubSpot Agency Model?
- Amber’s take on Client Retainers in Revenue River.
- Defining Retainers in an Agency Space
- The Core Responsibilities of a Chief Operating Officer in an Agency
- Different Types of Challenges in Measuring Profitability
- Different types of Client Engagements
- The Importance of Project Management on Operations
Presenting Sponsor: ZenPilot
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Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Amber Kemmis on LinkedIn
- Revenue River
- Career Opportunities at Revenue River
- HubSpot
- Eric Pratt’s Agency Journey Interview
- BugHerd – tool recommended by Amber
- Pastel – tool recommended by Gray
- 15Five – employee engagement tool recommended by Amber & Gray
- ZenPilot is a 15Five partner – contact ZenPilot if you’re interested in additional 15Five resources and special 15Five pricing.
- SmartBug
- Gray MacKenzie on LinkedIn
- Andrew Dymski on LinkedIn
- ZenPilot
Episode Transcript:
Gray MacKenzie
All right. Welcome in to another episode of Agency Journey. This is Gray McKenzie. And this week I’ve got the pleasure of bringing on Amber Kemmis, who is the Chief Operating Officer at Revenue River. Amber, welcome to the podcast!
Amber Kemmis
Thank you for having me, it’s great.
Gray MacKenzie
I’m excited to dig into the story. Will you give us kind of an overview of what your role looks like today and who Revenue River is?
Amber Kemmis
Yeah. So I am the COO of Revenue River, which I’ve been in the agency world for about eight years. But at this agency for the past year, a little over a year. It’s funny because I feel like I’ve worn an operations hat for probably the last three to five years, but finally got the title to match it. So now people take me a little bit more seriously when I tell them how to run processes and things like that. But my day-to-day is really helping our team.
Amber Kemmis
It’s a lot of removing hurdles and helping to ultimately make processes move more efficiently, ensuring that our agency is running profitably. And again, to get a very profitable agency, you have to remove hurdles all along the way. So a lot of process engineering and measuring data and making decisions based on that data.
Gray MacKenzie
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense if you can give us a quick overview. So we are coming up in the HubSpot ecosystem around the same time as Revenue River. We joined the HubSpot partner program in 2012 either. I think 2012 was the first year going to inbound, and it was either that year 2013 when I first met Eric. And of course, Eric spent. Eric Pratt, the founder at Revenue River, has been on the podcast before. But can you give us an overview of team size? Obviously, primary services. Have things shifted significantly from being a kind of a traditional HubSpot agency?
Gray MacKenzie
What does that look like today?
Amber Kemmis
Yeah. Well, I think the HubSpot agency world has shifted quite a bit. I would say it used to be all about inbound marketing, building out digital inbound marketing campaigns, and sort of helping clients create the content and things they need to drive goals for their marketing agency. And that was the case for a lot of HubSpot agencies. But for Revenue River and I think a lot of agencies as well. The shift has very much become on the technical side of HubSpot and helping clients to integrate different technologies, ultimately figure out how to better optimize their HubSpot and get more ROI out of it.
Amber Kemmis
And a lot of times they’re handling the marketing aspect of it. We still support clients on the marketing side of things, and we have clients where we’re supporting them on a twelve-month plus retainer and doing sort of full-service digital paid media SEO, things like that. But our big growth in revenue this last year or two has really become on Rev Ops, helping clients to stand up HubSpot for the first time and really actually even supporting some of the HubSpot onboarding that HubSpot used to do themselves.
Amber Kemmis
We’re now doing for our clients and for HubSpot customers makes a lot of sense.
Gray MacKenzie
There’s a lot of teams that have shifted in that direction, and also a number of agencies that have grown really quickly in that ecosystem, too. Has that shifted the way that you engage with clients? Are you starting with a discovery project or are you going straight into a retainer with most clients?
Amber Kemmis
Yeah. It depends on what their scenario is. So there are a lot of clients that we will work on a discovery basis and support on standing up their HubSpot, but not actually will work with them ongoing in a retainer. Vice versa. There might be clients. We just had a client kick-off in the last couple of weeks that they already were on HubSpot doing a great job, but they needed help on the marketing side of things. So we went into Discovery and a long-term retainer, but I would say our sales team does a great job of doing enough deep-diving ahead of time so that we don’t have to have that discovery resell the client and have a gap and then work on a retainer.
Amber Kemmis
We go straight into the retainer and then on the project side of things, it is jumping into a project where we might not work with that client ongoing makes sense.
Gray MacKenzie
There’s a ton of questions I could ask the kind of as a follow-up there, but I want to talk about your story a little bit was SmartBug. Your first move into the agency space.
Amber Kemmis
It was and I said I was never going to work for an agency. And the reason I said that was because I was the director of marketing and had hired multiple HubSpot agencies to support us, and they kept coming up short. I just never walked away feeling like this is a great partner. But at the same time lived in North Dakota and decided to make this career out of HubSpot and my experience there. And I needed to find a remote company. And Lo and behold, SmartBug was that remote company.
Amber Kemmis
And it was an agency. So I was a little bit resistant but jumped into the agency world there. And I don’t know if I could ever go back.
Gray MacKenzie
Yeah. Why was that such a good fit?
Amber Kemmis
I think it was a good fit because I immediately was challenged in both two things about Revenue River and SmartBug What I appreciate about both companies is that they really do care about the client and solving for the client. And I immediately was challenged. And also in that challenge, realized that this company does care a lot about getting the customers experience right where I didn’t feel that from my other agencies that I had worked with.
Gray MacKenzie
That makes sense. What was the transition like going so you can walk us through?
I think you were kind of in a leadership role in the client services team at SmartBug for a while and then the transition to Revenue River, I think started were you similarly in a client service role and then into operations, maybe walk through that journey? I’d love to hear you mentioned kind of feeling like you were in operations for a long time. So how do you draw that distinction? And what is that kind of evolution for you look like?
Amber Kemmis
Yeah, I would say in both companies, I’ve been heavily in client services. We never had an operations team at SmartBug, actually. So when it came to defining process, measuring profitability as the head of client services, and really a good chunk of our revenue, I was responsible for that. The buck kind of stopped with me on those operational responsibilities. And then when I pivoted over to Revenue River different title but still had the same type of people reporting up to me and was very much brought on and to be responsible for really shaping the way that our client’s services, what they looked like, how we measured profitability ultimately.
Gray MacKenzie
What our processing system looks like in serving our clients makes sense from the co-rule today. If you had to break down kind of where your time goes in a week, I’m sure it’s split in a bunch of different areas. But what are the three or four main functions or main areas where you’re investing your time?
Amber Kemmis
Yeah. I never want to lose touch with what our customers and our clients need, because I think when companies and people and operations can become too far removed from the customer, they start to make decisions that aren’t the best of a client. So I spend a lot of time listening in on client calls, talking to our customers, maybe more so than most operational people do. Based on that, get you informed and decide on what kind of service areas do we need to redefine how we go about delivering this?
Amber Kemmis
And what does that look like? And I’m working all the way from helping our sales team decide what goes into their contracts to the point of how do we define that in our project management system? So that ultimately what we sold and what we’re executing on are very one-to-one and match up. And then there’s the back-end side of it. It’s how are we doing and delivering those things? Are we effective at it? Of course, I have a team of awesome people who signal to me when things are off track.
Amber Kemmis
I’m not in our data every day, all day, but I have a great team who will signal to me and great systems in place where they can tell me, hey, this is getting off track. I think it’s a bigger problem than just a one-off. What do we need to do? I jump in those situations and I’m removing the hurdle.
Gray MacKenzie
Yeah, that makes sense. What is that? To put a little bit more meat on the bones around what that looks like as things are being flagged to you? Is that coming from, like, an account manager saying, hey, this client is frustrated with, like, are they flagging that or do you have symptoms that you’re specifically looking for? What are the things that would indicate here’s an area where Amber has to jump back in?
Amber Kemmis
I would say there’s a couple of different areas. One account managers definitely are some of the most vocal people in any agency. I think they are customer advocates, so they will signal to me when something feels broken. I have a strong marketing background as well. My roots are in marketing, so I also am looking for things like, hey, are we staying up to date on our marketing practices or revoke practices? And so I’ll talk to the team and they’ll give me indicators that, hey, this isn’t on track or this isn’t where it should be.
Amber Kemmis
But then I would say the most key thing is that I have a director of operations who’s really awesome. And he has an entire data set of profitability measures like utilization, effective bill rate on track, off track, timelines and budgets. So I can see at any given point in time here’s a set of projects that are delayed. So, for example, just to give you a super concrete example, I’m going to pick on our web team, and they’re going to hate me later for this. But if there is a cog in the process of website redesigns, for example, we were short development resources for a little while.
Amber Kemmis
I quickly could see that because I could see that we had a stack of Dev projects stuck in our development pipeline or that phase of the project. I can quickly jump in, try to figure out what we can solve there, bring in more resources if needed. But I’m able to see really quickly when anything gets sort of a cog in the system.
Gray MacKenzie
That makes sense. What’s the biggest challenge with measuring profitability?
Amber Kemmis
There’s so many challenges, the biggest one for us. We have different types of engagements. So there’s the retainer side of things as well as a project. And so one thing I’ve learned in operations and living in sort of both worlds is you can’t measure both the same. You have to look at them very differently. And so I would say the biggest thing in measuring it effectively. That’s common to both of those. It’s probably you’re relying a lot on humans, and humans are prone to error. They’re not always great at tracking their time and time.
Amber Kemmis
Data is a big aspect of determining. Not if you’re profitable at the bottom line, necessarily. But if you are profitable on particular projects or deliverables.
Gray MacKenzie
That’s the struggle that feels like every agency runs into. How do we get this time data back up? I’m assuming the bulk of revenue river team. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m assuming most of them are salaried not hourly to members, but what you’re looking at, I’m assuming in terms of profitability, you’re probably trying to see profitability by client, by service line or by area of the business. It sounds like maybe by engagement type as well. There’s something to product versus a retainer. I do think there’s an element where not all revenue is created completely equally.
Gray MacKenzie
The revenue that, you know, you’re going to have coming on a monthly basis. And this is a nuance that I didn’t realize early on. But where folks want to have a slightly high in a lot of cases want to have a slightly higher profit margin on project based work where it’s in and out and back and forth versus retainer work. I think most agencies go way too far with that, and their retainers are hardly profitable, and projects are wildly profitable. But then also looking at profitability and a lot of team member by team member, like, how does this role make sense?
Gray MacKenzie
How do we grow this role in this area as you’re managing all that? What are some of the key tools in the tech stack that you guys are leaning on to pull that data out?
Amber Kemmis
Yeah. Good question. So we use actually a combination of air table for a lot of our it’s a little bit manual, but reporting back on key data, and it’s sort of like my big picture view of how our projects are doing overall. But all of the information that’s fed into there, we’re using teamwork, and I would be lying if I didn’t say that we use good old spreadsheets to pull some of the data out of all the systems, bring them together. I’m a little bit of a spreadsheet, so I’m comfortable and okay with building a pivot table.
Amber Kemmis
I get excited when I get to build a pivot table. And so we do rely heavily on sort of when we’re running the analysis. And it’s not like on a daily basis or a weekly basis, but on a monthly quarterly when we crunch numbers and we need to break down that data in a couple of different ways by people by service line, for example, we’re working in spreadsheets.
Gray MacKenzie
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I’m going to switch gears to a couple of different places here. First one is around hiring. How deeply tied in are you into the recruiting and hiring and staffing side of things right now?
Amber Kemmis
Well, a lot we actually don’t have a full recruiting hiring team. And so there are certain parts of the business that I’m a little bit more involved. But when I came on board, one of the first things I did was evaluate what our hiring processes look like, where there was improvement, and more recently, have just been actually focused heavily on the great resignation. The thing we’ve all been maybe experiencing already or looking forward to in an agency world is high stress. There’s no denying that agency is going to be a more stressful environment.
Amber Kemmis
So I think as an agency, we’re most prone to the effects of the great resignation and a lot of people looking at new jobs in the next year. And so I’ve been heavily involved in hiring, recruiting and, more importantly, retention just because of trying to ensure that we keep talent and so that I have less talent to go find in the future.
Gray MacKenzie
That makes sense. I’m assuming right now you have openings. We’ll make sure we put this in the show notes as well. Is there a good careers page on the Revenue River side to point people towards?
Amber Kemmis
Yeah, I don’t know the domain off the top of my head, but we have a careers page. It’s got constantly fed with openings. I would say our HubSpot roles are most not vacant, but most open because it’s the highest growth area of our business. But we’re also continuing to look for digital project managers as well as growth strategist, which is basically our digital marketer.
Gray MacKenzie
I just searched it here. So it’s a hard URL to remember. RevenueRiver.co/careers would be the URL we’ll put it in there. But you have a job here. Digital project manager, systems automation, which sounds similar to a role that we’re hiring for, which is kind of a workflow automation specialist. Obviously, we help a lot of agencies streamline their Ops and click up kind of the next evolution for a lot of agencies like, hey, we got to get the groundwork in place to be really successful, to measure profitability, to operate as efficiently as we can.
Gray MacKenzie
And the next step of that engagement, I think a lot of agencies flip this the wrong way and try to automate first versus build the right system first and run it. I love this role that you’ve got speck out here as well. There’s a whole bunch of automation. Once you’ve got a system that’s working, well, that can happen in a lot of these roles, which is awesome.
Amber Kemmis
Yeah. And that particular role is actually what we’ve learned about digital project managers is they either love the really technical side of things or they want to be on the creative side of things. And so we started to specify in hiring for that role. Hey, upfront, you need to know you’re going to be a part of some really technical, automated types of projects versus the creative website redesign side of things. We like to differentiate it because we don’t want people to sign up and get the wrong interpretation simply because we are a digital marketing agency, right.
Gray MacKenzie
That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. The other question I have for you that I want to run by you was around someone who’s earlier in their career trying to follow a different path. I don’t know how many team members revenue Rivers at right now, but you’re a good sized agency. You’re in a leadership role there in the COC, someone who’s kind of oriented towards the operational side of the businesses. What are the things that you wish that you knew earlier in the career or kind of the key points that would have made that transition in that career path a little bit easier for you?
Amber Kemmis
Yeah. I think one thing I did right to give myself a little bit of credit is I spent a long time in understanding what it was like to work with clients, to be on the digital marketing side of things. I feel like if I hadn’t had that, I might make some decisions today that would take me in the wrong direction from an operational stamp, maybe the right direction for us, but not the right direction for our clients. So I think whatever operational role you’re going to be in, especially in an agency world, spend some time on the ground floor understanding what it’s like to deal with clients, to be a part of those engagements.
Amber Kemmis
Maybe you don’t have to be a strategist or consultant necessarily, but really spend some time understanding what it’s like to be the person facing clients every day, because when you start to make decisions, I think one thing that has earned me some street credit a little bit is that I did spend a lot of time being the client facing person. And so when I make a recommendation, people trust it a little bit more than if I had never had that experience. What didn’t I do that?
Amber Kemmis
I would advise somebody newer in their career. I honestly think that one of the people I’ve learned the most from was a former Gartner process engineer. So if I could advise anybody who wants to be an agency operations long term to do anything, it would be go get your PMP or Go and understand project management at a pretty deep level, because that experience and learning that along the way has helped me to be much more effective than not having any of that background of okay, what’s the three legged stool in project management?
Amber Kemmis
How’s that affecting agency’s operations?
Gray MacKenzie
Overall, it makes a lot of sense. Any specific examples of kind of where those lessons have come into play or even like the specific story is always more exciting. But I guess kind of areas of what you do in the day to day, where you feel the greatest impact from that.
Amber Kemmis
I would say mostly, I would probably say the most. The area I think that it probably affects most is gosh. This is hard. I’m trying to think of one specific example. It’s simple, but scope management and how scope management plays into the entire process later on is such a huge element of an agency. I’ve seen it done ineffectively, and then I’ve seen it done really effectively and just having a really solid understanding of how you define a scope in a strong way helps me ensure that my sales team all the way down to the people executing on it are sort of speaking the same language, which I wouldn’t have had that if I didn’t get educated by a Gartner process near on that aspect.
Gray MacKenzie
That’s amazing. I’m glad that you brought out what you did well too, because that wasn’t really the way I framed the question, but I wanted both sides of it, and that ability to understand what are these people who are asking to do something actually living through is huge, both from you mentioned the credibility, but also just from an internal empathy and the perspective that gives you. I’m sure that’s been a huge asset. This is the one tricky question for you. Not really a tricky question, but you mentioned using Teamwork and some of the other table and some of the other platforms you use.
Gray MacKenzie
Are there one or two lesser-known tools in the agency space that you use that are like either your secret weapons or tools you’ve been digging recently.
Amber Kemmis
My lesser-known tools are highly used or used quite often. I would say BugHerd is one that it creates so much efficiency for our web development process and just manages the flow of bugs. And it’s a great client experience tool as well. They don’t feel like they’re having to log issues in a spreadsheet, which, if you are an agency doing that, please stop. Like, your clients can have better tools at a pretty low cost. And then I would say the other big efficiency tool or tool that I think is really valuable.
Amber Kemmis
Knowing where employee retention is headed in the next year is we use a tool called 15Five to measure on a weekly basis what our team’s pulse is like and then the best feature or aspect about it, and we don’t spend a lot on it. So it’s not like a high investment culture amp type of thing, but it allows people to give each other high fives. And in a virtual world, being able to see each other like give your team made a high five and also see each other do it.
Amber Kemmis
It’s really cool. It gives me visibility into the good things that people are doing because a lot of times problems end up on my desk. It’s complaints and problems. So it’s really nice to just have that in my slack feed and see that people are doing great things as well. They just wouldn’t end up on my desk because I’m the person who removes obstacles.
Gray MacKenzie
That’s awesome. Both of those tools are really good. I’ve used BugHerd in the past. There’s another tool similarly called Pastel. Just use Pastel dot com. A Loki and his team in Toronto are building that out, and it’s a pretty cool tool. They’re newer than BugHerd, so I don’t know what feature to feature looks like right now, but both of those get a lot of high marks from our clients that we use 15 five as well, and that piece has been at first when we implemented, I was like, this is a little bit more formal than what we were doing previously, but it’s actually been super nice and the trends and reporting and stuff there’s actually a lot of good data being captured and centralized inside.
Gray MacKenzie
The tool, which is not the fundamental purpose is the human aspect and human touch and connection that you pointed out, but the data is also useful. Those tools we’ll make sure they wind up in the show notes. It’s been an awesome member. I appreciate you coming on, being willing to share and you’ve got a basketball practice to get to. We’re talking about kids and playing chauffeur, running people around for folks who want to connect with you. Obviously, we’ll put the revenue Riverside and everything else in, but anyone who wants to reach out or follow your journey Where’s the best place for them to go.
Amber Kemmis
The best place to reach me is on LinkedIn, Amber Kemmis. So just search that there’s not another one of me out there with that name so you should be able to find me pretty quickly and you can always reach out to me via email as well at akemmis@revriv.com.
Gray MacKenzie
Awesome. We’ll make sure both of those wind up in the show, notes Amber, thanks for coming on and sharing your journey with us today.
Amber Kemmis
Thanks for having me, Gray. It’s been great bye.
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