Break the rules

- Hey everybody! Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute. This week, I am coming to you from Christmas Central, in my family room. And you know, I'm filming this the week before Thanksgiving, and I am breaking one of my cardinal rules which is: No Christmas stuff up before Thanksgiving. But this year it sort of felt like it was okay to break that rule, that adding another week or two of Christmas joy was a good thing. And you know, 2020 has had a lot of us breaking a lot of our own rules. I know at AMI we've broken a lot of the rules that we had set. For example, we're not going to facilitate Traction over Zoom, we're only going to do it in person. We are going to hold all of our peer group meetings in person. We are going to stick to a very rigid schedule and agenda We are going to stick to a very rigid schedule and agenda for certain kinds of meetings. We've had to reinvent a lot of things in 2020, and I know that you have too. So one of the things I'm thinking about as we go into 2021, as we're talking about the vaccine and things getting back to normal, one of the things I'm thinking about is, what are some of the rules that I broke that actually turned out to be beneficial to the clients that we serve? What are some of the things that I thought weren't going to work, that worked? What were some of the things that we made changes around, that actually gave me new ideas to offer completely new services that are helpful to agencies? As we enter into December of 2020, and we all start thinking about 2021, I think we are all eager for 2021, I want you to start asking yourself, "What rules did we break in 2020? And which rules are we happy to go back to in the new year? And which rules are worth at least thinking about continuing to break? Or maybe we are not going to do what we did in 2020, but when we broke the rules in 2020, what did we learn? Is there a way to retool or rethink the way we do something?" Is there a way to retool or rethink the way we do something?" I think 2021... If 2020 was the year of innovation, and everybody is sort of coming up with new ways to do things, I think 2021 is about sort of plussing up some of the things that we did differently this year, to make them a more permanent change in 2021, as we get back to whatever "new normal" looks like. So, as you head into your planning sessions and as you're thinking about the year end, what rules are you going to keep breaking in 2021? All right, I'll see you next week.