After Curiosity lost in a review for an account the independent agency was vying for earlier this year, Chief Marketing Officer Ashley Walters took to consultancy NBZ’s dedicated Slack channel for new business leaders like herself to ask for advice on how to get her team through the loss.

“We have been on a new business tear the past few years,” Walters said. “This was the first [review] we lost. I asked the group, ‘What do you do when you lose? How do you rally the team?’”

Recent account wins and losses

Based on the feedback, she said she created a whole new “postmortem” process for after the agency pitches an account. The process incorporates the “bring a brick” improv philosophy, so every person on the team brings one idea to improve the pitch process next time, regardless of whether they won or lost, Walters said.

NBZ is an agency search and growth consultancy founded in 2020 that works primarily with small agencies. Its dedicated Slack channel has helped Walters and other new business leaders, who typically work by themselves or among much smaller teams than other agency disciplines, network and gain critical advice for navigating the pressure they’re under to grow revenue amid the shaky economy.

“There’s something very lonely about new business,” Walters said.

Slack messages and personal coaching sessions

The Slack group has exploded in popularity, with people on a waiting list to get in, as new business leaders look for guidance on finding and growing accounts and brands remain cautious with their ad budgets, accounts shrink and more clients move to project versus retainer-based work.

As such, NBZ Co-Founders Rachel Segall and Simone Oppenheimer Mandel are expanding on the channel they created in January and launching a membership program for new business leaders in October.

Called NBZ+, membership will cost $500 a month and it will include personal coaching sessions, events and insights from NBZ research partners that can help new business leaders get quick insights for a pitch, Segall said. Members will also be admitted into the Slack group, which already has about 50 people in it from primarily small agencies, where new business leaders are especially working on smaller teams.

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Segall and Mandel said the membership program is designed to further the consultancy’s mission of “democratizing the win,” or helping small agencies succeed.

NBZ+ will look to admit 50 members to start; everyone in the Slack group will get first dibs on a membership, Segall said. They’ll be grandfathered into the Slack channel regardless, even if they don’t want to sign up for NBZ+.

“If you’re not active for three weeks, we take you off,” Segall said of the Slack channel, and the co-founders will look for NBZ+ members to be just as active. “It’s 50 people and we have a waiting list. We said, ‘You know what? There's something here about community, about networking, about learning and sharing.’”

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The people who have gotten the most out of the NBZ Slack channel are those who are actively participating, asking for advice and networking with other members, Segall and Mandel said.

“Our departments are one of the smallest within an agency,” said Natasha Kesaji, head of business development for independent agency OKRP and an NBZ Slack member. “Just to have a community to soundboard with, it’s so valuable. The way in which business is being awarded, whether it’s project-based or it’s becoming more narrow or specific in terms of discipline, we’re curious to understand how other people have tackled it to get some perspective.”

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Kesaji said the Slack channel has been most useful in providing her tips for working with certain consultants and insights into how certain brands treat agencies, and if they’re worth pursuing. Anything client confidential is off limits, she added.

Segall said there is no other dedicated community for new business leaders to learn from each other and this guidance is even more critical today as their responsibilities increase.

“Now they’re marketing, they’re PR, they’re prospecting, they’re doing agency positioning, branding, some of them do internal communications,” Segall said, noting how understaffed agencies, which are struggling to hire because of all the other pressures on the business, are looking to new business leaders to be responsible for all aspects of growth.

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Walters said agency branding is one of the biggest focuses for new business leaders now because of the influx in competition from the rise in new shops. “It’s very competitive right now,” she said.

How to position your agency has been a focus of the Slack group, Walters said. For her, though, new business is a very personal discipline because “it’s like dating,” so having a community to support you when you lose out on an account and feel as if you just went through a “break-up” has been the most critical aspect of it.

While it may seem like these professionals would be in competition with each other, both Kesaji and Walters said there is a camaraderie among small agencies in which they want to see each other succeed.

“Us independent agencies root for other independents,” Kesaji said. “There is more than enough work to go around. It’s not like we have secret sauces. There is just a lot of opportunity to help one another and help the industry.”