Leadership Levers
This podcast spotlights leaders' actions so they may enhance their organization’s performance and culture.
We feature CEOs and industry-recognized Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who share their experiences and insights on three key challenges: people, performance, and profit.
If you are a leader who wants to learn from your peers about improving performance and financial returns, please join us.
Leadership Levers
The Magician's Approach to Leadership, Culture & Marketing with Jimi Gibson
What happens when rapid growth exposes cracks in your structure - and you decide to rebuild from the inside out?
In this episode of Leadership Levers, Jimi Gibson, VP of Brand Communications at Thrive Agency, shares how his team preserved culture while scaling fast - and what marketing and magic have in common.
Jimi's leadership journey spans from graphic designer to creative director to executive leader. Along the way, he’s stayed focused on what matters most: culture, communication, and connection.
At Thrive, where industry turnover can reach 50%, his team maintains a voluntary turnover rate of just 5% - a direct result of intentional culture-building and leadership decisions.
When a hierarchical structure started to crumble under the weight of growth, Jimi led the company through a major transformation, shifting to a matrix model. Their approach included an “alpha team,” a communications plan that invited team feedback, and a strong commitment to protecting trust and continuity.
Why setting clear expectations - and setting realistic expectations about the difficulty of change - was essential to success.
Jimi also breaks down his magic-to-marketing framework that taps into core human neurological responses - to drive better connection and communication.
We cover:
- How Thrive maintained stability while transforming operations
- Why matrix teams helped restore trust and clarity internally
- The neuroscience behind compelling messaging—and what magicians know that marketers forget
- How clear expectations and structured pilots kept their culture strong during change
For agency leaders, marketing executives or any team navigating growth and restructuring, this conversation is full of insight - and a reminder that the best culture strategies are the ones that stick when pressure hits.
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Welcome to the Leadership Levers Podcast. I'm your host, Will Gladhart, CMO at the Culture Think Tank. At the Culture Think Tank, we empower leaders with metrics that strengthen culture, drive performance and return. We're here today to learn about the actions leaders have taken to address organizational change. Today, our guest is Jimmi Gibson, VP of Brand Communications at the Thrive Agency. Thanks for taking the time to join us.
Jimmi Gibson:Great to be here. Will Thanks for having me Excellent.
William Gladhart:Let's begin by having you share with our audience a bit about yourself, your background and your organization.
Jimmi Gibson:Yeah, absolutely. Well, I actually started working in ad agencies right out of college, which led me from graphic designer to creative director and then eventually running a full agency under the Omnicom umbrella of agencies kind of gave me a on the ground, real life example of what leadership, operational complexity at scale looks like, and so it was kind of cool to meet with a client, figure out what their business problem was, and then go back and meet with the team. I joined Thrive Agency about five years ago. I've actually had five titles in five years, which is an awesome thing with a growing company.
Jimmi Gibson:I actually came to start the strategy department and then moved into executive leadership and operations, running the teams that do all the work for our clients. Vp of brand communication basically just means I get to go out and tell our story of a hundred years excuse me, of 20 years. A hundred years, that would be crazy. Digital marketing, 20 years in business and just try to help other organizations figure out what to do and maybe teach some lessons that we've learned the hard way. And then a previous chapter in my life I was actually a professional magician and it actually turns out that magic and marketing aren't really that different. Um, both are about understanding people, telling stories and creating those wow experiences that people want to recommend you or your company to somebody else. That's a brief overview.
William Gladhart:Well, thank you for sharing that We'll be discussing through questions today. As a warm-up to our conversation, would you share why you believe a healthy culture is critical?
Jimmi Gibson:Yeah, I would say in the agency world it's not just a nice to have, it's actually a survival strategy. Industry turnover related to agencies is around 30 to 50% annually, which is kind of crazy. That's not good for other team members, it's not good for continuity of projects and work that you do for clients. We've actually been able to maintain voluntary turnover rates of about 5%. So that's sort of a unicorn in the agency world.
Jimmi Gibson:When you look at agency environment, it has the background for relentless deadlines, demanding client expectations, constant changing of campaigns and updatings. It can lead to burnout, disengagement, people leave. There is sort of this magical timeframe within the agency world. Once somebody gets about three to five years experience, they're highly marketable outside the organization. We have folks that have been with us five, seven, 10, 15 years. We have folks who maybe get enticed by some of the higher salaries outside the organization and we have a considerable number of boomerang employees which we feel really great about. So I think culture is really what we spend a lot of focus on. We're intentional about building that culture. It protects our people from those spirals and things that are going to happen at other agencies. I've been on an agency interview where they actually had showers in the creative department and you go huh, why do they have showers in the creative department? Oh, I'll be spending weekends here, right?
William Gladhart:Maybe they don't want you to leave.
Jimmi Gibson:That's right. So I think just from that perspective, when we have team members that have been in environments that are not healthy for themselves or their family and friends, for their mental health, we really put a flag in the ground and we say we're not going to be that company and then the residual benefit is that we avoid all of those turnover client churn that happens usually when team members churn Right, how do you explain that? And then we have a number of metrics that we measure to make sure that we keep those on track and maybe we'll get into some of those as well. But yeah, it's really at the core of how we focus our business is our culture.
William Gladhart:I really love hearing that. I always find it interesting that we had to create a term for both client and employee side called churn simply to term for both client and employee side called churn simply to because people came and went and nobody really asked why. So I think it's really exceptional that, not only as an agency, but that you and your group are having boomerang employees, having individuals that actually come back, because the grass isn't always greener. I think that's something we'll touch on here in a minute. It's been our experience that leaders tend to struggle in three key areas people, process or profit. In your role as a leader in the agency, could you identify three of these areas that presented a cultural challenge or something that you all had to address and overcome?
Jimmi Gibson:I would say the cultural challenge started with people, but then it really exposed some cracks in our process. Between 2016 and 2020, we grew extremely fast and the original structure that we had set up, which was a hierarchical structure, really couldn't sustain how teams operated and how we delivered work. In how we delivered work, the sense of team, with that smaller agency, began to fade. People didn't know who to go to. Clients didn't always feel like they had a consistent partner or knew who was doing the work for them, and then internally, silos began to form, not out of intention, but just out of speed, right. So you have these deadlines. You need to meet them. If you can't figure out who's on your team, you're probably just going to end up trying to do it yourself. If that's not your core area of expertise, quality is going to drop. So I would say those were some indications, and then we put some a plan in place to address that.
William Gladhart:Okay, you mentioned when we had had our prior conversation that there were some challenges around those people and process pieces. I think you all did something that was fairly unique to actually overcome those challenges, so could you tell us a little more about that?
Jimmi Gibson:So you can imagine the complexity of assigning work when we are a full service agency. So we're doing everything from SEO to PPC, to paid media, to organic social, to creating websites. Each of those as a project or an ongoing service started to look like a bowl of spaghetti when you tried to trace back who was working on what, especially with the account management team. It was very frustrating In that hierarchical model really being able to track that. I mean, we have an internal project management tracking approach, but it frustrated a lot of people. It took more time to get work delivered, so forth and so on. As part of that, I recommended that we move the entire agency to a matrix organizational structure, and if you're not familiar with a matrix organizational structure, you're basically creating smaller teams and pods. And if you read a lot about a matrix structure, the criticism is you end up having two bosses. And so there was a functional boss that, like if we had an SEO manager, we need to control the quality of the SEO, but then, from a team lead process and how that team does their daily work, there's also a boss. We understood those complexities. We decided to actually restructure the entire company into four matrix teams, which is not a good idea. After you've been in business for 20 years. The best time is when you start Right. So we knew there were going to be problems and challenges and we basically met with all the teams and said this is what we're going to do. This is why we're going to do it, and we expect they're going to be hiccups, but we're not going to change everything all at once. We're actually going to have an alpha team, that is, our test case team, and we're going to work out all the kinks and gaps and opportunities for failure during that time and we're going to run that team for four months and we're going to learn where the breaks in the system are.
Jimmi Gibson:Well, what actually happened was, as we started to move into this because we had let everybody know that it was going to be messy Everybody expected that. We had two goals we didn't want to lose any people. We didn't want to lose any clients through that process. The people who were on that team became evangelist quickly because they were like, oh my gosh, this is so much better. You're going to love it. We actually did a little PR tour and we had people from that group. Myself went around to all the other team members and departments and started to talk about what life was going to look like when they moved into the structure. And we actually moved into the full rollout a month early.
Jimmi Gibson:Obviously, we continued to refine, but the feedback that we got was why didn't we do this 10 years ago? This is awesome. I finally know who's on my team. You know, when you have a decentralized workforce and you're not able to huddle around the table like we were in the beginning stages of the company, you lose that rubbing elbows with somebody, and this brought that back. So, not only from a process oriented, but also culturally, you felt like you knew your teammates. You got introduced to new people that you hadn't worked with before. We consider that a win all the way around. We didn't lose any clients, we didn't lose any employees and we now took that step backwards so that we could solidify the structure to now set us up for another layer of growth within the company. So again, that would lead. We took a people problem. It turned into a process situation.
William Gladhart:Now we're able to bring on more profit because we would have crumbled if we tried to layer on more client load in the previous structure of the organization tension when we first talked was that intentionality, but also the communication plan, the fact that you had a beta team and you were going to run that out and let people know exactly what was going to happen in the organization. We see that as one of the hugest pitfalls in private equity and M&A is nobody tells anybody anything and then it's surprise but you forget about all the people that built the business and all the people that built your customer portfolio and your client base and then if they leave, who else leaves? So I think that was a really interesting intentional approach. So you mentioned at the start of our conversation that marketing and agency work is a little like magic. So I think that makes an interesting kind of wrap up to our conversation. But would you share a little more about that?
Jimmi Gibson:Yeah, so you know my background. I got a magic kit when I was six years old and just kind of kept going with it and I was actually doing birthday parties for my friends in middle school and their parents were paying me to do these shows for my friends and I was like, hey, wow, there's something to this. And then in high school I was introduced to a gentleman that worked at an ad agency and he had an account for a global brand that we've all heard of and they wanted a promotional entertainer to help them with some promotions they were doing. Well, that relationship lasted 16 years. So while everybody else was working retail and cutting lawns, I was doing these shows and I sort of took that as far as I could. I had a theater in Myrtle Beach, south Carolina, performed a corporate show at the MGM in Las Vegas. I've been on TV with Buddy Balestro, the cake boss, when they were doing a special on Buddy's vacation, nice.
Jimmi Gibson:So I've done quite a few things and was lucky enough to be part of a training with some other magicians, with a Broadway director who was in the original cast of Annie. He's directed 22 Broadway productions, also a magician, and so we all went to Montreal to do this training. We were supposed to bring two and a half minutes of our act and then each night during that session, after we learn our lessons for the day, you would perform your two and a half minutes, and they would. He and this other coach would critique those two and a half minutes for two and a half hours. And so we talked about the structure of what it takes to fool somebody, because, you know, unfortunately magic is not real. We're doing something and trying to get the audience to believe that we've defied the laws of physics to make this thing real.
Jimmi Gibson:And the structure of how you communicate you make a connection with the audience, you pique their curiosity and then you bring that trick to a conclusion pretty much mirrors how you need to approach your marketing message right. Especially if you're on LinkedIn these days, you'll get a connection request and it's interesting it's called a connection request because it should be a connection right, it shouldn't be. I'm going to send you this, you, you owe me the fact that you're going to accept my invite, and then immediately you're going to get hit with a close right. Here's what I'm selling you. And then you're sitting there as the recipient going. I don't even know who you are.
William Gladhart:What is right. Well, and to your point, I don't know who you are, I know nothing about you, my messaging is completely wrong, et cetera, like we've all had it and cause we're all frustrated by it. So sorry to interrupt, continue. Oh no, no, no, no.
Jimmi Gibson:And so I actually sort of reverse engineered a framework that activates parts of the brain that is important to make sure you have all of these processes. It's a typical storytelling structure, but when you meet somebody, there is this release of oxytocin. If it's a good connection, you have good feelings. Hey, I'd like for this to continue, whether it's in a personal relationship or a business relationship. There's some rapport there. The neurotransmitters in your brain are like oh, wow, okay, let's see where this is going to go. Now you really need to activate the curiosity component. What is it about this relationship that, selfishly, could benefit me, right? And so that's a release of dopamine.
Jimmi Gibson:And we've heard about dopamine addiction with social media. It's actually not addicted to dopamine. It's actually. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter that you have an expectation of, a reward. You want somebody to like or share or comment on your post, and so that is what's released.
Jimmi Gibson:But in a communication standpoint, you have to say something that piques that person's interest enough for them to lean in. We've all heard the theatrical term on the edge of your seat, right? Why is that? Because you're curious. There's something in it for you. So you have to put your brain in the mind of the audience and go what's going to interest them enough that they're not going to tune out? They're going to delete my email, they're going to check their phone, you know. Whatever the case may be. But you can't drag that out too long because you need to move to that conclusion. And through that process of connection, you've been given permission to now move them into this state of curiosity and now the conversion can happen in a natural way. And then that's the release of serotonin, which is basically everything's right with the world. This is great. If you just follow that simple framework, you're going to be better than 99% of the people out there related to messaging. And again, it just layers right on top from a magic trick to a marketing or business conversation.
William Gladhart:Yeah, I think that's. I think that's really valuable for others to hear as we wrap up our conversation today. Is there anything else you'd like to share with fellow leaders?
Jimmi Gibson:Yeah, I think one of the things that we've really been intentional about is thinking about our core values.
Jimmi Gibson:A lot of people go through the process. They may have an offsite, they slap it up on the website, but they never really live through Thursday, and so everybody in the company has gratitude for somebody on their team that did a good job. We also ask folks to give a Kiva loan or participate in the giving a Kiva loan to all every client that comes in the door, and so we just want to instill this appreciation for the world, appreciation for the work that you do, and we bake that into everything that we do, and we bake that in to everything that we do. Every person knows our core values. It's how we operate and it becomes a language within the organization. So I would say, if you're just slapping it on the website, it's not really going to do much. You have to live it, breathe it and make sure everybody on the team understand what it's about, and I can see that it makes a difference and I'm all for it. So that would be the one thing I would leave folks with.
William Gladhart:Excellent. Well, thank you for sharing that, Jimmy. I've enjoyed having you as a guest on our Leadership Levers podcast. Thank you again for your time and your insights. Great Thank you. Thank you for joining us on the Leadership Levers podcast. Joining us on the Leadership Lovers podcast. Find all our Leadership Lovers episodes on the Culture Think Tank website at www. theculturethinktank. com or listen on your favorite streaming platform. We'd love to hear from you about the challenges you have faced as a leader. Tune in weekly as we invite leaders to share their experiences in strengthening culture and performance, one action at a time.
