How the Creative Director Role is Changing in the Digital Age
Our industry isn’t just changing, it’s evolving. What we offer clients, how we’re measuring success and the tools we use are all constantly changing. While the changes are helping us grow our agencies and future proof our businesses – it [...]
Time to Retire the Digital Jedi
Long after the Web evolved into a marketing tool that could be used by brands, agencies scrambled to hire executives that knew digital. Advertising became so obsessed with the idea of digital that they felt the need to change the [...]
Use Content to Tell Your Agency’s Story
You have to tell a story — a great story — to get people to listen. You need to create a narrative that grabs and holds their attention. This isn’t easy, and there are many misguided attempts to master “storytelling” [...]
10 Ways to Establish Order in Your Advertising Agency
It’s no secret: Most advertising agency owners come from inside the advertising industry.Naturally, they’re very good account executives, copywriters or art directors, but they’re not always seasoned businesspeople. Like most creative people, they’re not interested in restrictive, formulaic systems and [...]
Overstaffing can break your small business — here’s how to know when to fire someone
Small business owners often have little time to develop strategies to effectively monitor their company’s financial health. As a result, many of them know what their company needs to survive, like how much revenue they need to cover payroll, but [...]
Are agencies a dying breed?
I always find it fascinating when conferences bring together a panel of professionals and ask them to look into their proverbial crystal ball and tell us how the world will be different. A couple weeks ago, during AdvertisingWeek's conference, a [...]
Why you need to stop billing by the hour
If you're like most agencies, you are still primarily using the billable hour payment. This model relegates you to a manual laborer rather than a solution-driven partner. It also puts you and your clients at odds, rather than forging a [...]
How to Prevent Scope Creep when Scaling Your Business with Ryan Meo
If there’s one type of project that every agency struggles to do profitably – it’s websites. But what if it was possible to do web dev and not lose your shirt? My podcast guest Ryan Meo runs ScaleSquad.com, a private [...]
How to Stop Your Client from Shopping Around
Think of the last time you went shopping online. Was it for clothes? Shoes? Maybe even a graphic designer? We live in an age where creative contractors are only a click away. More and more, clients are hiring them for [...]
Why Good Writing Matters — and 4 Ways to Teach It to Your Team
In a time of emoticons, abbreviations, and 140 character-count replies, a three-paragraph email is the equivalent of “War and Peace.” But communication is a vital part of office life, whether you’re a lab technician sharing results or a human resources [...]