As President & Founder of Anvil Media, Lewis oversees strategic direction of the company, with a focus on sales and marketing. He speaks internationally, writes for industry publications like SmartBrief and has been an adjunct professor at Portland State University since 2000. Since transitioning his career into digital marketing in 1996, he’s founded or co-founded four agencies and 2 organizations. He’s been named a Top 40 Under 40, Marketer of the Year by AMA Oregon and a Top 100 Digital Marketing Influencer by BuzzSumo in 2019. Outside of work, Lewis enjoys consulting with startups and spending time with family.
What were the top 3 mistakes you made as an entrepreneur, and if you could start over what would you do differently?
The first error I made in building my business was focusing too much on process and tools and not enough on the people.
As a result, I became disconnected from my team as far back as 2010. It took a few years to manifest, but a wall began forming as trust and respect eroded on both ends. As I took on the account management role recently, attitudes began to change immediately. Working directly with my employees provided me insights into their brilliance, struggles, and perspective. I was able to appreciate their commitment and craft and the feeling was reciprocated. My team appreciated my ability to manage client expectations while supporting and protecting the team.
After my first client call as account lead a few months ago, I received a compliment from a coworker that set the tone: “Kent, you accomplished more in that one call than the previous account person did in the past year. Thank you.” That single compliment erased all of my reservations about my new role and inspired me to take our account management capabilities to new levels. The experience was similar for our other two executives relatively new to their roles as account leads. Suddenly, there was a new and powerful level of connectivity, respect, and admiration amongst the account team and discipline experts at Anvil.
My lesson (what I would do differently) was to maintain connection with the business by checking in regularly with the team and my clients. It’s been a powerful lesson that was costly but we’re now better for it.
My second mistake was measuring long-term success based on profitability.
I’ve always managed my agency based on profitability, as that is largely how I pay myself. Unfortunately, I became a victim of my own success. In 2010-11, Anvil experienced record revenue and profits. I was happy, the team seemed happy and all was good. Unfortunately, the false sense of confidence came crashing down in 2012, resulting in my need to retool the business completely in 2013. Since then, I’ve put more measurements in place to ensure I have a more accurate view of how the business is doing, including predictive indicators like NetPromoter Score surveys.
If I could have done it differently, I would have put these checks and balances in earlier and been more diligent about sticking to procedures.
My third (but not final) mistake was taking the concept of “hire smart people and get out of the way.”
I hired smart people, which is difficult enough, but my mistake was trusting they could do the job and would ask me for help if they were struggling. Instead, I expected performance, and the team didn’t want to upset me with bad news, so they struggled and often, quit before we could fix the underlying issue. Since then, I’ve learned to Inspect, not Expect, with regular check-ins to ensure progress towards larger goals. It’s not perfect and we continue to refine our processes, but I do have a much better understanding of the team’s abilities, happiness, and long-term fit.
My do-over would be to look beyond someone’s knowledge, experience, or personality to assess if they truly have what it takes to get the job done. By leveraging unique ability or passion, setting expectations up front, and providing meaningful support, I feel we have a better success rate now than we did before.
Kent Lewis | President & Founder of Anvil Media
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