The Agency’s Rainy Hake Austin on leadership and AI integration

In the interview, Hake Austin emphasizes the importance of ethical leadership and a growing industry shift away from a purely transactional mindset. She also outlines how The Agency is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance internal processes.

This conversation excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.

Velt: You do have a boutique feel to your brand. How do you scale that as you grow bigger?

Hake Austin: It’s a great question. It’s probably the No. 1 thing that keeps me up at night when I think about our growth and our expansion. We’ve had great success there. The team focuses a lot on processes and systems as we do that.

So what I mean by that is if we’re bringing on a global partner, for instance, it’s a courting period. I mean, we spend maybe six months interviewing them, them interviewing us, making sure it’s the right fit. I personally meet with every single global partner who joins before.

She explained that maintaining The Agency’s culture requires a highly intentional approach that’s focused on processes, systems and people. She also pointed to regular support from centralized teams.

Hake Austin: We have an ops team that literally meets with all of our offices once a month. Our centralized marketing team trains local marketing staff. Even our global partners are mentored monthly. We coach and mentor them to make sure that they know the newest strategy and trends.