Company: Agency H5
Owners: Kathleen Sarpy
Year Started: 2001
Employees: 51 – 100
On this episode of “An Agency Story” podcast, we are joined by Kathleen Sarpy, founder of Agency H5, a PR and marketing agency that serves clients on a national and global scale. Kathleen shares her journey, reflecting on her beginnings as an ambitious, driven individual who never envisioned herself as an agency owner. She highlights the importance of resilience and adaptability, citing her persistence in getting hired at top agencies and her decision to step out on her own when corporate life conflicted with her values and family goals.
Kathleen speaks candidly about founding Agency H5 in her basement in 2001, equipped with just a Rolodex and a “prayer and a week.” Despite early financial challenges, Kathleen’s creative and scrappy approach paid off, gaining traction with high-profile clients through standout campaigns, such as her idea for Coleman’s 100th anniversary celebration involving a giant s’more. She explains that her early years were marked by a rollercoaster of highs and lows, yet her commitment to providing exceptional, personable service helped Agency H5 stand out among larger competitors.
A defining theme of the episode is Kathleen’s dedication to cultivating a values-driven workplace. She recalls intentionally building a culture around “kindness, creativity, passion, hustle, and integrity” and implementing a “no-asshole policy” to ensure that only supportive, respectful clients and team members formed part of Agency H5. She discusses how her role as a mother influenced this approach, creating a flexible, empathetic environment where employees could prioritize personal milestones as well as professional ones.
Kathleen emphasizes the importance of long-term relationships, both within her team and with clients. Over the years, these connections have consistently helped her agency grow, with many clients bringing her into new projects as they transitioned to new roles or companies. Russel and Kathleen discuss the unique, lasting value of building and maintaining meaningful relationships in business, viewing them as a “garden” that blossoms over time.
She also touches on the evolution of agency culture, particularly through challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and explains how Agency H5 adapted to virtual operations while retaining its core values. For Kathleen, this evolution means remaining open to input from her team on how to keep the company’s culture strong and relevant, emphasizing flexibility and a supportive environment.
Toward the end of the episode, Kathleen reflects on her future with Agency H5. With almost 25 years under her belt, she sees the agency as a continual work-in-progress, evolving with new talent, fresh ideas, and growing relationships. Concluding on an inspiring note, Kathleen advocates that entrepreneurship is “made, not born,” citing her journey as a testament to the power of perseverance, values, and vision.
Listeners are left with a powerful message about the importance of integrity and resilience in business, the value of nurturing relationships, and the need to lead with empathy and adaptability in a constantly changing world.
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Show Transcript
Welcome to An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. From the excitement of starting up the first big sale, passion, doubt, fear, freedom, and the emotional rollercoaster of growth, hear it all on An Agency Story podcast. An Agency Story podcast is hosted by Russel Dubree, successful agency owner with an eight figure exit turned business coach. Enjoy the next agency story.
Russel:
Welcome to An Agency Story podcast, I’m your host Russel. On this episode, we have Kathleen Sarpy, founder of Agency H5 based in Chicago, Illinois. Kathleen opens up about the drive and determination that shaped her path from persistent job seeking at top PR firms to stepping out on her own when she felt a disconnect between her corporate role and personal values. Her reflections reveal a career built on resilience, creativity, and the courage to start fresh. From a humble and Rocky start in her basement, kathleen shares the highs and the lows of agency H FI’s beginnings, including memorable client campaigns that helped her agency gain traction despite a challenging start. She emphasizes the values driven culture, which he created around kindness, creativity, passion, hustle, and integrity, ensuring a positive work environment for a team and an authentic approach with clients. Listen to Kathleen’s unique approach to leadership and her belief in nurturing relationships like gardens as the foundation for lasting success. Enjoy the story. Welcome to the show today, everyone. I have Kathleen Sarpy with Agency H5 with us here today. Thank you so much for being on the show today, Kathleen.
Kathleen:
Thanks for having me. Great to see you.
Russel:
Great to see you as well. Can’t wait to have a wonderful conversation today. If you don’t mind, start us off. What does H5 do and who do you do it for?
Kathleen:
Agency H5 is a values driven firm based out of Chicago that offers public relations, integrated marketing, and social media strategy to a wide variety of global national and local clients all over the country.
Russel:
You summed up what I imagine has to be a lot more very succinctly. It sounds like you’ve been doing this for a while and know your stuff that we’ll certainly get more to in deeper into the episode, but before we find out all about those amazing, wonderful things, I want to hear about young Kathleen. What were her goals and aspirations and, and we’ll get to where she got to today.
Kathleen:
Young Kathleen was always a very curious child. Pretty talkative child. Shocker that I went into PR, uh, but I do believe that God gives you certain gifts. Mine was connecting with people even at, you know, second grade. Early Kathleen didn’t know what she wanted to be when she grew up, except that she knew she wanted to be a mom. I’m fortunate that I was able to get that role, uh, as well as having a long career in public relations.
Russel:
Okay. Not even something like, you know, be the princess of England or just something outlandish, no young career aspirations?
Kathleen:
Sadly, I was actually interested in being an attorney because I was very good at making arguments and being able to sell, sell in things, especially to my mom and dad as the youngest of four siblings. But I had actually, talk about the impact of teachers, I had a teacher tell me that girls didn’t make good lawyers back in, in the seventies. I believed him, actually, so I, I’ve always made it very, um, clear that, girls could do anything they want to do. I think early on that was a discouragement to me, but in a way it actually was a blessing because I got into a career that I think is perfectly suited, uh, for me, for my personality and who I was when I was seven years old. I always talk about my seven year old self. I think that the things that you often get judged for or graded on when you’re little and then being your superpowers when you get, grow up.
Russel:
It is crazy, just the little comments that someone can make. I had a similar-esque instance. My dad told me I really wanted to be a chef. That was actually a really big passion, I was looking at culinary schools and all that. And he made some comment that I had to go. I couldn’t just go to culinary school, that I also had to go to college. I was doing the math. It was like, I’m not going to school for 10 years to be a chef. I’ll go do something else. But, one, I didn’t, I don’t think that was even true advice, but it kicked me off my, not that I’m complaining, but it kicked me off my chef path. So be careful what you say to young kids out there is maybe the takeaway.
Kathleen:
I think that’s true. I bet you can still be a chef if you want to be now.
Russel:
I’m the resident home chef, uh, around here. I’ve gotten to live out that in, in, in many ways, so I’ll take that. I know you’ve been doing this agency thing for a while, but what were the early days of your career? And how were you being formed and molded for this eventual agency owner journey.
Kathleen:
I graduated college in a little under three years from my alma mater, Purdue University. I graduated Phi Beta Kappa top of my class just wishing to grow up. I honestly wanted to get out of college and be a grown up when I was just, just 21 years old, which now looking back, I should have stayed in college and drank a few more beers and enjoyed myself. But my early days were at, um, I went to Hill Knowlton, which at the time was one of the top PR firms, still is a phenomenal firm in Chicago. But I really wanted to work there. I had met a woman named Wendy Levi Lienhart at the time, Wendy Levi, who was a recent graduate of Purdue, maybe within the last seven or eight years. I thought she was so incredible. She spoke so articulate. She had such great style. She really loved her job in this wild thing called public relations that I never had heard of when I was a junior. I just knew, that I wanted to grow up and be like her. I just followed up with her and she was very gracious. She was also from Chicago, said reach out to me when you graduate. She helped me introduce me to people in the office and I wore them down eventually, Russel. They weren’t hiring, but I kept reaching out in the early nineties and said, I’ll pick up your dry cleaning. I figured out how to get ahold of the GM, uh, early in the morning before his assistant would arrive. I was determined to get a job at the place where he worked. I ultimately did. He finally was like, listen, kid, you don’t need to get my dry cleaning. You don’t need to call me at 7 am at the office, I would love to hire you and got me in for an interview. I was early on, you know, raising my hand a lot to say, let me try things. Let me get in the room with the adults at the big table. They went through a few layoffs at that, uh, agency back then. I was fortunate to stick around, uh, with a lot of senior people. It gave me a lot of opportunity with only a top heavy organization and a lot of junior people, the chance to try a lot.
Russel:
I always love a good persistence pays off story. Great to hear. How did you get to the point where you eventually said, you know what, I’m starting my own agency?
Kathleen:
I went and did a corporate side gig. I wanted to try that out and see if I would like working on the corporate side. I worked for Chicago Title and Trust Companies. I built their first website, working with agencies, did homes reports and learned the real estate industry. It wasn’t a very exciting. But, I was able to do a lot of creative things at the company and it really gave me the chance to lead and to form a team. Then I went on to Edelman. I was very lucky to work for the largest independent PR firm in the world that’s, uh, It’s still around today and incredibly successful. Early in my career at 25, I was their probably youngest VP at the time. I remember actually getting hired to be a vice president to run craft foods and broad foreman wines business nationally, uh, Corbel champagne. You can remember the champagne was a big deal coming up to the millennium. I was asked by, by my boss what I was doing one weekend. I said, oh, I’m celebrating my birthday. How old are you going to be? I said, 26. She went, don’t tell anybody here how old you are. And I always ask the question, are you asking me my age? Or are you asking me my ability? They’re two very different things. That became just a good, a good reminder of just the fact that you can be whatever you want to be and play the part, play the role. I had just recently gotten married wanted to start a family and had my first child while I was at Adelman. When I came back, I recognized pretty quickly that I, my values were being questioned. Do I want to be a great mom or do I want to be a great senior vice president? I went to a smaller firm, a boutique firm that I thought might be a little better for work life balance. I found out that it was just as busy but, uh, I was able to work on some really cool brands. I found out I was expecting my second child while at that smaller firm. I was like, wow, I think this is a wake up call. God’s telling me, Kathleen, you have to decide what path are you going to take? Because I was working on 19 new business pitches. I think we won 19 in seven months. I wasn’t doing myself any favors, pregnant with one child and with a little baby at home. I took a chance on myself and started my own firm in my basement with a week and a prayer and a Rolodex back then. It’s not glamorous, was next to my sump pump. January of 2001, I gave birth to our son, John Henry, in March. I made maybe, Russel, five grand the first six months. I thought, oh, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble. Then I found, uh, the Coleman Company came and said, we’re doing our hundredth birthday and we need a big idea. With a colleague of mine, we, um, brainstormed the idea of the world’s largest s’more. Instead of birthday candles, we had a hundred lanterns from Coleman on top of a giant s’more the size of a warehouse. We had 850 employees put it together in Wichita, Kansas at a hundred degree temps. We broke a world record. I was on CNN headline news with my client all day the next day. That was the breakthrough moment of when Agency H5, uh, began to get some steam. And then September 11th occurred just real quick. That’s when a lot of the big firms were probably getting their budgets cut significantly. It was a very sad and very tumultuous time, obviously, in our country. I was always saying I’ll be happy to be the strategist, but I’ll also be happy to stuff the press kits back then. We actually had paper press kits we sent out to folks. It was like, I’ll do everything from running your strategy for your business down to the very basic press tax. That was a appealing value prop, I think, for a lot of larger clients like Kraft Foods and Allstate and Sears in my early days, because they could get great value out of the work that I was doing without paying the price tag of a big global firm. That’s really where my business took off.
Russel:
Not to say there’s not often a rollercoaster ride in the early days, but it sounds like you had a really, really big rollercoaster ride even in your first year. The two words I just wrote down, just thinking about how you’ve described, you know, just who you are and how you approach business: persistence and scrappy. Just this idea when I, I don’t know what I was thinking there. You said five grand for six months, that had to be tough. How close are you thinking like, uh uh, this ain’t going to happen? I got to move on. Or were you said, nope, I am making this happen and it’s just, it’s, it’s not, if it’s when?
Kathleen:
It’s actually a little bit of the first. My first boss out of college, uh, at Hill Knowlton was a woman, is a woman. She’s phenomenal. I just talked to her this week, Janet Cabot. Even when I left Hill Knowlton, she bet on me and said, you’ll do great wherever you go. She was one of the only encouragers, like when I was leaving, she wasn’t mad. She was actually excited for me. Janet has remained a great career mentor and friend for 32 years. I have a child now that’s older than I was when I started working for her, which is quite weird and surreal now to look back on. But I called Janet and I said, I don’t know. I may have made a really bad decision. I had a three month old at the time. I had a three month old baby and I had an 18 month old. I was like, what am I going to do? She said, you’re going to be just fine. I believe you have the right connections and the right attitude that you’ll be just fine. She was right. I reminded her of that this week when we spoke, I said, you gave me hope that I was capable. You just said, give yourself a little time and patience and it’ll pay off. It’s funny how I’ve realized that lesson over and over again. That’s been a theme I think of my agency is that, the beautiful gardens I planted of relationships early on in my career really bloomed at different times over the years since the firm was founded 24 years ago. All these people have been incredibly kind and remembering the work I did or that my team did later on. That’s how my agency grew, was just return to business and happy clients that would pass my name on to somebody else. In similar situations, a lot of brand managers that were, moving jobs would take me along the ride with them to other products within their organization or different jobs as they moved in their career. That has been a huge, I think, help, um, is being persistent but also delivering. When you deliver, people remember that and they go back to the people that didn’t let them down. It just took a little momentum to get me going, but we have been, haven’t really stopped ever since.
Russel:
I can believe it. Hopefully we’ve inspired anyone listening out there to find someone to believe in, in you or them or themselves, but then also maybe a little inspiration, go believe in someone today and just the power that that can have, in someone’s life or future, or especially when we’re doing something so darn hard, like running a business, but especially an agency business. That’s a wonderful, wonderful story. We got a lot of ground to cover from, from when you started the agency to, to present day. But give us, give us a couple highlights in the first few years of just or just really even in, almost entirety of your journey. What’s a major milestone or two, like, hey, this was a game changer for us? Whether it was a shift in thinking something that actually happened that you overcome. Anything stick out in your mind in that sense?
Kathleen:
I’d just say that sticking true to who I was from the get go. I built, selfishly, my agency off of the model of what I wanted in my work life. I wanted kind people. I wanted to work with people that, were passionate about their business and I was passionate about theirs. It’s really hard, as you probably recall, working for clients that you didn’t have a lot of passion for. I decided since I was working for myself, I might as well be selective about the type of clients I wanted to work with, but they were clients that would emulate my values, which were not mean spirited people. I wanted to work with kind people. You’d never like to go home to your family and be grumpy because you’ve been abused at work by a client. I decided, like, sorry for the podcast listeners here, but a no asshole policy where I only wanted to work with nice people. I really stayed true to that. I’ve worked with so many good kind, smart people over the years, both employees and clients. I wanted to infuse creativity into everything I did. I wanted clients that liked my authentic excitement for their business. I wanted, to hustle. I loved getting things done quickly and moving on. Back to your point earlier about scrappy I’ve always been known and H5 has been known as the scrappy firm in the hallways of big, big corporations, because we compete against the big the big agencies for a lot of global brands and we win. We win not only because of our scrappy approach, but because we do award winning work. But we also are really respectful of, of their time and don’t take forever to get things done. Our deadlines are two or three weeks out. It gets, don’t let grass grow. Get it done and move on. Ask a busy mother of eventually five children, which is the H5 and H5, it’s a nod to the five children that I was really so lucky to have, and to really be human and happy in her job. That’s the H for H5, uh, human and happy and the five is, is for kindness, creativity, passion, hustle and integrity. I wanted to say what I was going to do right, do it and then say I did it. Those were what I didn’t see at the big firms. Not necessarily all those values didn’t exist, but just not consistently for me. I started a place where I can have that and then also give that same privilege to anyone that I would be so lucky to work with over time.
Russel:
I had no idea, right? You take a letter, letter and a number and that how much meaning that you have brought to H the word H and 5, that that was a fascinating. I love just how you talk there about leading with values. It sounds like that came very natural to you, which I’ll be honest and say, I don’t think that’s always the case. I even think in my own journey, wasn’t the case, I just, you know, just thought it was just about grit and, and put your head down and work hard. But it eventually did come to find out that it, you have to have purpose, principle values, um, to lead any organization of a few people or beyond. But it sounds like that came natural to, I don’t know, or did, was that a learning process for you to know how important that was to have that in your business?
Kathleen:
I just felt early on in my career that I was apologizing a lot for being a mother, which is crazy because we wouldn’t, we wouldn’t have people on this planet if there weren’t mothers around, right? And fathers but, um, it seemed that the guys got a better pass at, like, going to work and going home, whereas women were juggling the household and work. I created a place of utopia, I guess, for me. But I thought if other women and men on the journey in their careers got sort of disenchanted with the bigger agencies, they might be interested in my model. I’ve had over 250, maybe 300 now, Russel, uh, people that have worked for me and I’ve been able to see them grow in their careers, have children. I have people that started with me as college grads that have had babies, gotten married, I’ve been at their weddings and see them have children and it’s, it’s a really fulfilling role as the owner and founder of this agency to not only do great PR work for a lot of awesome companies and brands, um, which we can talk about, but, to be able to be a place where people can be human and happy. It didn’t come easy to me in the sense that, um, I had the five figured out when I started the firm because I didn’t know I was going to have five kids to be honest, I renamed it later on. But people that shared the similar value system, so being nice, not being competitive and mean spirited, there’s a lot of crabby people in agency life and people that want to one up one another. Certainly that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted people to just be free to work hard, do a great job, extraordinary experiences with great brands and corporations and nonprofits, but also, like, not apologize for having a mom who is sick in the hospital or a baby that has to go to the doctor or a kid’s play at school. Those five values have served us very well. We’ve been able to really hire based on those values, self regulate our culture based on those values. I’ve been able to reward people with bonuses, etcetera.
Russel:
I’m really curious, because I think that’s a really important thing, like you said, hiring for values. I think most owners, or at least a lot of owners, learn eventually in the hiring process that it’s not just about resume and skill, but that there’s a lot more about the intangible traits, the character traits, uh, and then more importantly, even as you’re saying the value traits, what were some of the things that you did? I have to imagine there’s some interesting things you did to uncover someone’s values when you were, baked into your hiring process. Anything stand out along those lines?
Kathleen:
Their personal lives. Not in a creepy way, but I want to know what makes you, you right? I ask what brings you joy. One of the things that the boutique agency I worked for in that short seven or eight month period before I went out on my own, after leaving Edelman. They did a great job of finding people’s own exciting journeys or passions, the place they want to go or an item that they’re coveting that they want and, doing that. I would buy girls, women that work for me, certainly not girls, women Jimmy Choo shoes to say, you can walk in my shoes when they had rocked a project or they had done an exceptional, thing for a client. I did things like that, things that you couldn’t do if you were owned by a parent company. It was fun to just say what’s your shoe size? In casual conversation and then surprise them and take them to the shoe, boutique and say, have 10 pairs of shoes and say, try on whatever one you want. We toast champagne and say, good job. I like doing untraditional ways of rewarding people that you wouldn’t get anywhere else. A day off with a spa day with someone’s mom who flew into town. I tried to do things that made people feel like they were seen as the person as opposed to the worker. Obviously you can see so many people are qualified on paper but I’d ask interesting questions about what do you do on the weekends? What do you read? What’s your favorite thing to do for just you? What is something that you wish you could change about yourself? You can learn a lot about somebody’s personality and how they work in the environment you own or have just simply by, digging a little deeper than just what they put on their resume..
Russel:
I feel like not subtle reference that you’ve actually used several times of garden. I can make my own inference there, but just in terms of what that means, right? Development, growing, blooming, you know, beauty. So many things that, that can reference, but I’m just curious from your end. Is that a very intentional word that, you really approach this notion of your business relationships, et cetera?
Kathleen:
It’s something that I’ve just noticed as a theme. I don’t think I intentionally set out to be a nurturer of gardens, but I do think that I, my family is a garden. I’ve really watered and grown my, my beautiful children. I have six now that I’m remarried and very happy with my husband, Chris. I have six kids. I water those children with my love and with my attention and with my advice. Maybe they don’t want it, but, I provide it. The same thing goes for my work family, you know. I think that’s just the terminology I created to make sense of the nurturing side of me, as a little girl, back to a question you asked me earlier, what did a little Kathleen want to be? I wanted to be a mom and my mom was a nursery nurse at the hospital. I learned about parenting and, being someone that loves babies, just through watching my mother. That was like my favorite part of the week and then get to go upstairs to the nursery and see my, my mom behind glass holding these little babies. I have a really good role model in my mom and dad. My mom was a nurturer and my dad was this guy who would be beloved everywhere we went. He was kind to everyone, no matter their station, no matter their job or role. I witnessed early on that, that attitude of treating everyone with kindness and by the golden rule. My two parents really shaped me. I always say relationships are the currency of business and you are the company you keep so choose wisely. I’ve been gardening and watering for all these years and my businesses has bloomed in different seasons, like relationships I had 24 years ago, pop back up unexpectedly. It’s really fun to see that when it happens. Cause it’s happened many, many times in my tenure of having this firm.
Russel:
I feel like in the course of this conversation, there’s like 10 different tangents that I really want to go down. I don’t think we’re going to have enough time to get to even most of them.
Kathleen:
Part two, we’ll do a part two someday.
Russel:
Even going back to this idea of a garden and just how important it is, what you’re saying is, yes, we’re going to measure revenue and how many leads we got, but that maybe a more important measurement needs to be how many meaningful relationships does the business have, or at least, you know, people within the business and how many people are we treating like they’re valuable that may not immediately have value? I often think of just the idea of how many people just, once a lead goes through the proposal process and doesn’t become something, so many agencies just don’t ever even talk to that company ever again. Even going back to your garden that, we got to put them in our garden and we got to be valuable and treat them as much, that’s what it sparks in me.
Kathleen:
No, I agree with that. I think that the most fertile soil comes from good relationships. I love connecting people and getting out of the way, Russel. I love it. I don’t need to be in the middle of the every connection I have or see, but I love making them. For instance, we work with Brach’s Candy on their seasonal programming. Very fun client to work on. Lots of fun stuff over the year, Valentine’s Day and Halloween and holidays and Easter. We also work with Great Wolf Lodge Resorts. We connected Great Wolf Lodge to Brach’s candy we suggested they do something really sweet for the holiday season. They created a candy corn sweet and it’s gone viral. It’s all over the country right now. We’ve probably reached in the last 10 days, two billion impressions in our campaign of this candy corn sweet in two places in the U. S. It’s really cool when you can put two people together and know that, or two brands together, two brand managers together, CFOs, CEOs. I love when my clients are like, hey, I’m making a role transition, connecting them to a CEO I’ve worked with before and say, this is such a great person. You two need to know each other. I’m getting out of the way. It’s so fun to see those relationships blossom and grow. I do think it’s, if you want to have a successful agency, have fertile soil, have a lot of really great relationships because it shouldn’t be transactional. I don’t think you should keep score. It’s an area that you’ll get very competitive if you keep score. It’s more about how do you help your fellow agency friends. How do you help a fellow client? I give media contacts to clients I don’t even work with anymore if they reach out. If a media outlet reaches out to us and we no longer work with that client, I’ll still make the connection for them because, uh, it doesn’t have to be all about money, but I find that the money always came when I did the right thing.
Russel:
I would say the person that keeps score is bound to lose. All right, well I am really curious about, and I have my own thoughts about this in my own journey, but I’m just really curious in your case. There’s a lot of people that, you know, kind of, I don’t know, but turn, turn their heads a little bit, this idea of becoming a little bit larger agency, you said you got up to 50 people because they feel like they’re going to lose some of this, these values and this culture and this, uh, you know, all these things that they feel it can only happen at, you know, five to 10 person size company. How do you view that? Share that experience. Was culture better at 50, or some larger number? Can you scale culture in that very authentic way?
Kathleen:
You’re astute to ask that question because as you grow, it is harder. I want to know everyone’s name. I want to know what they’re excited about and what their, when their birthday is. I want to know what’s up in their life to some degree and what books they’re reading. We talk about that at the office, what’s the latest hot book to read. Culture for me did get a little diluted. I also think when you have the wrong people in the role of leading culture, you gotta be really careful. I went through some seasons in my life where I couldn’t be at the office as much, when my parents passed away, for instance and they both passed within a three month period of one another. I had to be broken and work, you know, but I’ve, that’s part of the human part of H5 too, is I had to let other people see me in grief, but getting back up again through adversity. You have to get back up and dust yourself off and keep going. I had to for my kids and for my company, I’m in charge of all these people, my families. I had other people leading, uh, and they, if they aren’t the right person, there’s a dilution of culture and I definitely experienced that, but I was able to, once I got back into the grooves after my tragedies, um, I was able to get my culture, you know, strong again. What’s cool now is my culture’s so ingrained into people that work at H5 that I don’t have to even be there in order for that culture to flourish. But it definitely took my insistence that you can’t be unkind to one another, right? If you have a leader who’s, like, from the big agencies that maybe doesn’t care about kindness as a value. They could be exceptional at their job, but that is really painful and not necessarily a good thing if they aren’t bringing motivation and joy to the people that they are leading. Be very careful as you grow to ensure that the right people believe in your values too, because it can harm your culture if you don’t, but our culture is really strong right now. But it’s since I’ve had this firm, I would say the culture couldn’t be more solid and we’re going to be 25 years old in a year. It’s exciting to have maintained my initial reasons for having this firm, which is a place that’s a good place to work with good clients that care about us and we care about you. That we do everything with the integrity and the hustle that we are known for.
Russel:
Sounds like it goes back to, to values, certainly in your own case. Being true to those. There’s two things that, if you’re turning that question back on me, you know, absolutely right. Very much have to be careful on who you’re putting in positions that have a huge impact on culture. Not to say not every single hire you make really does have an impact on culture, but some people certainly have a more impact than others. That’s one of the things I started to come to find is, is, and I think even again, points back to your values aspect of, you know, people that they kind of sold me that they knew what culture was and what it meant, but then when push came to shove that they didn’t stand behind that word and that thought process, goes back to values. It’s like, okay, you don’t know what this means. That was a big wake up call to say that, you know, cause that’s in the end of the day, to your point of, culture is not lip service. It’s action. It’s doing the hard thing when in the face of, you know, what might be a very hard decision, but you just gotta stand behind it because you’ll eat your lunch if you don’t. I don’t know. I had, I’m sure there’s some dilution as you said, because we got up to about 40 when I was still in the agency. My perspective was as though, again, maybe going back to values again, is that the essence of what our culture was actually got to scale and become bigger, right? Learning was a big part of our culture and what started out as a little thing where it was just hopping around a table for 30 minutes on a Friday afternoon, turned into this thing where we could bring speakers into the business and really put the aspect of learning on steroids in this, the budget that we’re even allowed to give people to learn more and things like that, that just weren’t luxuries that we had in the, you know, the early days when we were smaller. I’ll just say it one more time, points back to what you’re saying of values, that we kept the values of our culture and just asked, how can we scale it? Because yes, there were some things that we simply couldn’t do size wise at 40, but whatever that value or that notion was there, we could just iterate on it or expand it to match what made sense for our size at that time. Certainly had to let go of some things on the, along the way, but I feel like we’re always replacing it with something as good or better, or at least with the same essence that we had before.
Kathleen:
I think that it’s important to listen to your team about what they need from the culture because it’s shifted. It’s shifted a ton since I started the company to today, post pandemic, right? We’re still talking about it, but a lot of things had to change. We weren’t going in the office all the time. How do you bring your culture to people virtually? How do you bring your culture to people that live in different states, which happened from the pandemic? As much as that was a horrible challenge for businesses, I was able to get a lot of talent from a lot of different places as well, just by hiring people that weren’t going to be physically in the office every day. I think that’s how we’ve evolved is by not just jamming our way down other people’s throats that work for us, but actually saying what would emulate our culture today? What are things you want where maybe five years ago they wouldn’t have asked for those things. I don’t care if people take a walk in the middle of the day or, or are doing laundry or have a baby pop up in a cameo on our calls. In fact, I encourage it because that, is what makes us human and happy. I think our clients are just normal human people. They’re just like us, right? I’ve seen a real evolution too. My client’s going, I wish it was like that at my company, or I wish that we could have our dog or baby at work, you know what I mean? I have tried to ask my team to tell me how to evolve our culture. It’s always going to be the, H5 will always stay at H5 but how kindness or how creativity, passion or hustle or integrity is seen today may be different than it was or will be in the future.
Russel:
You just created five more tangents for me, Kathleen. You’re gonna have to stop doing that. When you were talking about that, just thinking that like, that’s similar to parenting, right? What our kid needs at a certain age or a certain stage, or even a certain phase in the world of life or whatever is not what they need later or before. What got you here won’t get you there. I love what you said. Listening is a very key element in that. I’m really glad that I now forgot what the other thing that you said that stood out to me. That’ll get us going to the next question. I’m just curious where, what is the future of H5 look like? What’s the next 20 some years of the business?
Kathleen:
I’ve been a pretty live in the moment girl since having this agency. I haven’t thought too far ahead purposefully because, who could have planned for some of the things we’ve already experienced, you know, in the last five years. But I would say that I’ve got an incredible team, senior team in place. As I am in my fifties, and I have had this firm, which is crazy, almost 25 years. That’s a lot of my life. It’s almost half of my life I’ve been doing this job. I don’t have any plans to go anywhere, but I’m I guess I’m just very open to what, universe God for me wants for my firm. I’m very faith driven in the fact that when one door closes a much bigger door always opens for me always. I listen when people say about, oh, uh, you know, are you interested in funding? I built a debt free, really self funded business, bootstrapped, just like you and your brother-in-law did, you know, and built it into something that’s really special. My goal for H5 is just to continue to grow and flourish like my gardens. To really continue to be a place that people want to work and that brands want to seek out for their PR and marketing needs. We really do work with so many really cool companies and brands that I’ve had so many exciting experiences. Forrest Gump. I call it Forrest Gump moments where I, have gotten to do some things that I can’t even believe, like go to the white house or, be at Hollywood events that I’m surrounded by stars, But what’s been the most rewarding has been the people that I’ve gotten to meet and the mentorship I’ve been able to offer to really, really acceptable people over these years. Who knows where the future is going to lead me, but I just want to keep doing what I’m doing with grace.
Russel:
Can’t argue with that. It did make me just think of, I don’t, I feel like this is unique to the marketing or agency businesses, all the really amazing experiences that we have in the course of doing the work that we have just through our clients and, you know, experiencing their products, their events, whatever that might be. Any agency that’s been around a while has got just some really cool stories there. We’ll add that to one of the, one of the 10 part series of just interesting events and experiences. But well, I guess I better close it out here. One last big question for you, Kathleen, are entrepreneurs born or are they made?
Kathleen:
I think we’re made. I wasn’t born an entrepreneur. I was born a mother, for me anyway. I think that there’s no playbook for being an entrepreneur. I had no idea what I was doing when I started this company. I started it with a prayer and a week, like I said, a week and a prayer to just be a good mom. But it has certainly been a really cool journey to learn and to explore who I am as a leader and figure out how to be a good boss. There’s just been no instruction manual. I’ve just had to figure it out. I definitely think entrepreneurship is made. Cause I would have never anticipated being an agency owner. I call myself the accidental agency because I set out to be a agency of one for me. Then I just thought all these other people that really wanted to come on the journey with me because they saw the same things I saw at the bigger firms, that they had to sacrifice something in their own personal lives for them to have those jobs. I just never wanted that for myself nor for anybody else. So I made it, created Utopia.
Russel:
There you did. You made it. Beautifully put. Mic drop. If people want to know more about Agency H5, where can they go?
Kathleen:
They can just go to agencyh5.com and we’re on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, you can find us. I’m just at Kathleen Sarpy.
Russel:
Easy enough. There you know where to go folks. Gosh, Kathleen, wonderful conversation. It was so great to, to hear about all the different aspects of your journey. Particularly just really ringing home the value of values and all the other wonderful nuggets that we were able to gather today. Just really appreciate you taking the time to share those with us.
Kathleen:
Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. Are you interested in being a guest on the show? Send an email to podcast@performancefaction.com. An Agency Story is brought to you by Performance Faction. Performance Faction offers services to help agency owners grow their business to 5 million dollars and more in revenue. To learn more, visit performancefaction.com.
Kathleen:
Probably about 10 years ago, a colleague of mine, Carmen and I were working on the red carpet at a Chicago event for a major celebrity. It was an award ceremony. We had all of the guests, celebrities lined up on the red carpet doing the step and repeat, taking pictures. We got a call on the press line that the actual host of the event would not be coming. It was Steve Harvey. His daughter had a horse riding accident. She’s fine. But, they just, they were parents first, and they just didn’t come. We had an entire gala full of people. We had a press line of honorees, and there were celebrities in their own right. And then we had no Steve Harvey. We had to figure out how to let all the guests know, and to let all the celebrities know. That was one of those moments in PR, you can’t ever predict what you’re going to do in your job or how you’re going to handle a situation. That was one where our sort of stomachs dropped and we had to pick up the pieces very quickly and figure out a plan. We ended up just letting people know that he was being a dad first and that’s the right thing to do. But it was, one of those, like, oh gosh, how are we going to fix this in, like, five minutes kind of situation?
Russel:
That’s awesome. Wow. Again, it goes back to crazy agency stories. I don’t know if I could have handled the event space of, of marketing or whatever. This is real time do or die live. Based upon the story you shared, God bless you for being able to roll with the punches that that world entails.
Kathleen:
Events I would say in public relations are things you just can plan for, but never predict what’s actually going to happen. You’ve got to think on your feet. That’s one thing I’ve gotten pretty good at over the years.
Russel:
I’m sure. Oh, I have no doubt.
