Starting an agency is easy. Growing and scaling your business is anything but. There are lots of obstacles and landmines, not to mention just trying to run the agency, which can get in the way. My podcast guest Karl Sakas and I chatted about those obstacles and how to move around them. Some of [...]
Never had a mentor? Not sure where to start or how to structure a successful mentoring relationship with your employees? In my podcast conversation with Mitch Matthews, he helps us to understand what great mentoring looks like. Mitch will show you how to mentor your employees with a wide variety of tools and specific solutions [...]
Every fifth podcast — I’m doing a solocast. That’s just you and me, having a conversation about a topic that I know is on the minds of agency owners. For this solocast — we’re going to dig into a topic that I probably dive into every single week with agency owners — some good old [...]
When I look an agency owner in the eye and ask, “what’s your business succession plan?” it’s amazing what I see in their eyes. I work with 150 or so small to mid-sized (1 employee to 150 employees) privately held agencies every year. These are smart business owners who are successfully running profitable businesses that [...]
When I review an agency's new business plan (assuming they have one) one of the strategies that is usually built into the plan is building a thought leadership position for agency owners or leaders. Within that strategy is usually a list of tactics and one of them is almost always secure speaking engagements. Hard to [...]
One of the biggest issues that agency owners and other key staff that are charged with agency new business face is getting on the radar screen of their prospects. This is where a small business marketing technique could come in handy. Read on for more. Even when you have the experience, knowledge and chops to help a prospect move [...]
An ad agency creative brief is one way to get your creatives to stay on target when they may be struggling. In today's digital, data driven agency environment -- many agencies struggle to keep their creatives on target. We're evolving from the Mad Men era where creative was king to a time when results, ROI and [...]
Agency owners are really good at a lot of things. Unfortunately, mentoring employees for growth is often not one of them. I get it -- you want self starters. You don't have time to micromanage people. You want someone who can think/behave like an owner. You know how you get employees like that? You create them. [...]
Business trends including changes in salaries and benefits can make or break an agency’s profitability from one year to the next. That’s why we conduct a comprehensive annual salary and benefits survey and we’ve just wrapped up our 2015 edition (you can buy the 40-page final report here). The results are quite insightful. First [...]
One of the first lessons that I learned as a Dad is that while my words mattered, my actions trumped those words every time. My daughter watched every choice, every action and inaction, every moment – and whether I liked it or not, mimicked me. The realization that I was a constant learning lab actually [...]
