10 Steps to Hiring Your Ideal Employee You own a creative agency with a small staff. You’ve got an open position. While it remains open, it means more work for you and less time to manage your agency. Perhaps, your business is larger. That open position is going to negatively impact your productivity. That’s going to put a dent in your bottom line. Whatever the size of your firm, you can’t afford to have a position remain open. It’s painful for you. So, you make a hire quickly. Now you may have caused an even bigger problem. You might have hired an employee who can’t do the job, or who doesn’t have the personality to fit in with your culture. All … [Read more...]
8 Reasons Candidates Decline Job Offers at Your Agency
And How to Respond to a Declined Job Offer As a creative agency owner, you will know how difficult it is to recruit the right people. And it’s getting tougher. We’re currently in the toughest hiring market in living memory. Sure, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, at the beginning of October 2021, there are 8.4 million potential workers. But there are almost 11 million open jobs. It’s a candidate’s market. The competition for talent is intense, and it’s difficult to tell what the best candidates are looking for in a job. They might be looking for a company with a greater work-life balance or a company that offers more opportunities for professional … [Read more...]
Closing the Deal: How to Make a Job Offer Your Top Candidates Can’t Resist
7 Tips to Influence Acceptance When you’ve been through the hiring process and identified the candidate you want to hire, it’s galling if they reject your job offer. All that arduous work, time, and effort invested in hiring quality people has been wasted. I discussed the reasons candidates decline job offers in my previous article. In this article, I’m going to share advice that will help you make offers that the best candidates just cannot refuse. 7 Tips to Make an Attractive Offer to Your Top Candidates Many hiring managers falsely believe that making a job offer is easy. Put the details in an offer letter and wait for the candidate to accept. No matter how wonderful … [Read more...]
Foolproof Steps to Hiring an Employee into Your Creative Agency
Your Foolproof Checklist for Hiring Employees To grow your creative agency, you will have to hire people. There’s only so much you or your existing team can do. The problem is that you find hiring procedures for creative agencies more than a little challenging. If the hiring process leaves you frustrated and fearful that your chosen candidate will turn out to be a failure, you’re not alone. I’ve had hundreds of creative agency owners tell me their hiring horror stories. Others become so frustrated that they take potentially calamitous and costly hiring steps. Here’s a couple of examples: One executive told me that he has practically given up trying to hire … [Read more...]
Don’t Let It Go to Your Head: The Difference Between Self-Confidence and Overconfidence in Leadership
The Signs of Overconfidence and How to Combat It A good leader is confident in themselves and what they do. They take risks and lead by example. They inspire and influence. Confident leaders are more likely to be successful. But it is important to know where to draw the line. Are you letting your confidence go to your head? The problem with being an overconfident leader The overconfident leader is someone who overestimates their own skills and capacity to lead. They rate themselves at a higher level than they deserve to be. This is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect: a phenomenon in which incompetent people often have an inflated view of their own abilities. I’ve heard it … [Read more...]
How Can You Train Your Clients To Give You Better Feedback?
7 Simple Strategies to Motivate Exceptional Feedback Getting feedback from customers is arguably one of the most important aspects of being an owner of a creative agency. Feedback from clients can help you to understand your business’s strengths and weaknesses. It’s the best way to know what your clients prefer and dislike about a service or product. It can help improve their experience with the company and even generate more sales. You know this, though, don’t you? Then why is it that a Gallup study found two-thirds of employees have direct customer contact every day but don’t have a clue what their customers care about? How much better could your business be if … [Read more...]
Team Feedback – It’s a Fundamental Part of a Leader’s Confidence
How to Get Feedback from Your Team Feedback is an essential part of leadership. Giving feedback is essential to develop individuals and teams, and to boost their performance. However, many leaders (especially those with little leadership experience) tend to forget the importance of receiving feedback. I’ve seen this a lot with my clients. As you build and scale a creative agency, the pressure is on to ensure your people are doing their best work for your clients. That pressure often leads to a one-way street of feedback. In the short term, this serves the purpose intended: your team develops and does its best work for you. But without feedback from your team, how do you know you are … [Read more...]
The Practical Guide to Building Confidence as a Leader
How to Be a More Confident Leader When you own a creative agency, never underestimate the importance of self-confidence in leadership. Your business success is founded on building your confidence as a leader. You see, self-confidence is the keystone that allows your leadership to flourish. When you feel confident, the confidence levels of your team will improve. I recently read an article by Francisco Dao in Inc.com, in which he eloquently explains why confidence is the number one of leadership qualities: ‘Self-confidence is the fundamental basis from which leadership grows. Trying to teach leadership without first building confidence is like building a house on a foundation of … [Read more...]
Why Businesses Stop Growing: Common Mistakes to Avoid in Your Creative Agency
Don’t Let Your Growth Stall The process of scaling a company is not easy. Scaling your creative agency can be even more difficult. There are many common mistakes that people make when scaling their business and these can lead to stagnation of growth – or, in the most serious cases, business failure. This article outlines the mistakes that stifle growth, and which are commonly made by owners of creative agencies. We also share tips to help you avoid making the same mistakes. “Why isn’t my business growing?” One of the most common questions we encounter from business owners is why their business is not growing as they think it should. While there are many … [Read more...]
Saying No Will Put Your Business on the Road to Growth
How to Take Control of Your Business by Turning Down New Opportunities Your agency is finally growing its business, but some things feel out of control. You’re learning that entrepreneurship is a roller coaster ride. One moment you’re up, the next you’re down. The only difference between the real world of business and the fantasy world of a theme park is that you have no idea when the next trough and peak of your journey are going to hit your business. You win deals and lose them. You find the perfect person to hire, but they get ‘stolen’ by a competitor. You design the perfect marketing campaign, only to screw up your landing page so it doesn’t … [Read more...]
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