Jerry Colonna coaches venture-backed CEOs, and he’s coached a boatload of them! He’s worked with the CEOs of Etsy, Foursquare, Intuit, and Soundcloud to name a few. But not just when they are big and famous; he works with many folks who are in their startup phase. On a recent podcast, he said of the…
Too many agency founders have drunk the 24/7 hustle culture Kool-Aid. “We’re in a service business, we need to be there to serve our clients! This is what agency life is like, it’s not a 9-to-5 job.” You’ve heard it, maybe you’ve lived it! I’m thinking that might be why so many of you responded…
The messages from last week where I talked about freeing ourselves from the endless grind with no finish line and the idea of reframing our work to be light, easy, and fun brought out many encouraging replies, including this one: Hey, Brad! This morning, I reflected that 10 years ago, I was grinding, traveling, building…
According to Greek legend, Sisyphus so angered the gods that they sentenced him to the worst torture they could imagine. He will spend eternity pushing a rock up a hill — as it reaches the pinnacle, it will roll back down again. After returning to the bottom, Sisyphus would then have to push it back…
Over the last week, we’ve talked about how we have to price the customer, not the project. We’ve also looked at how letting the customer make trade-offs can help us close more deals and make more money. Today, we will talk about how charging more money helps us win better clients and provide us with…
On Thursday we talked about what your work is worth. Though we want our work to have some intrinsic value, the truth is that the only one who can tell us the value of our work is the client. The same work could be worth very little to one client, or a whole lot to…
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…