I’m in an agency owner’s slack channel where it’s common to ask questions about how to improve and grow businesses. I enjoy popping in every few days and joining in the conversation! Last week, one question stopped me in my tracks. This agency owner asked: “If anyone is willing to share, I’d like to know…
I got a lot of feedback from my emails last week about the value of account managers, and it’s clear that there’s quite a bit of confusion about what the job of an agency Account Manager is! With a big caveat that there are a LOT of different AM job descriptions out there, here’s what…
Most creative agencies have two halves of their business. One side is the people who “do the thing” – they might be artists and writers, or developers, or analysts, but the value they bring is in their skills. They work the magic! On the other side, there are the Account Managers. The account managers are…
Things with this new client have been going along great. You had an excellent strategy session and laid out a whole marketing plan for them. They were bought in – now you are into implementation. The work you’re doing for them looks terrific, right on track. Then the phone rings. The client wants to go…
I started life as an engineer, designing aerospace control systems. When we would start to design a new system, the first question we’d ask is, “If this project fails, what happened?” We’d look for the riskiest, most uncertain part of the problem and try to solve that part first. If we could solve the hardest…
One of the key roles of a successful agency owner is to build a network outside of your agency. You are your agency’s eyes and ears. You are scanning the horizon to find the “next thing” that clients are going to need, the problems that they are going to run into so that you can…
Thanks for your replies to Tuesday’s email about making business development easy. If I could summarize the replies, they’d (collectively) say, Once I’m “in the room” with a buyer, I’m golden – but how do I get “in the room”? How do I find more people who could hire me? 1. Who are the “people…
For the last few days, I’ve been comparing the process of bringing new money into your business to the process of gathering firewood. The most common reply I’ve gotten is some form of, “Sure Brad, but gathering firewood is easy, finding clients is hard! If I could just find clients lying on the ground that…
I imagine that you’re in a cabin in the woods. You’ve been gathering firewood every day for months. Firewood is piled all the way around your cabin, and yet, you feel compelled to collect more. You have to go farther and farther to get firewood; the once beautiful forest has been stripped of anything that…
I imagine that you’re in a cabin in the woods. You notice late one afternoon that you’re almost out of firewood. How do you respond? Do you panic? Do you worry or run around decrying how unfair this is? Do you count your sticks of firewood and develop a plan to ration them out? “How…