If you’re a business owner, you want your employees to feel as personally invested in the company as you do–but you probably know that isn’t likely. Still, your management strategy can have a huge impact on how deeply invested your employees feel in the work you do together. And getting everyone on your team to [...]
The smartest, most successful business owners have surrounded themselves with a strong, powerful leadership team. They don’t go into battle alone and they know that it’s easier to climb the mountain as a cohesive team. If you really want to scale your agency, build it for eventual sale and exceed your goals – you need [...]
I’m not afraid to admit that during tumultuous times, I harbored a secret fantasy. Like many stressed-out agency owners, I dreamed of a magical “new business person” who would join my team and, with barely a trace of oversight, begin to sell the agency night and day, acquiring profitable new clients. But that mythical new [...]
How do you recharge? I worry about you. I hang out with a lot of agency owners and I know that one of the biggest risks to your agency is owner burnout. It's that wearing fatigue that comes with 60+ hour weeks, sweating payroll, never really unplugging and everyone heading to your office when the [...]
The cornerstone of AMI is our agency owner peer networks. As an agency owner, there aren’t a lot of people you can be 100% candid with, when it comes to how things are going, what you’re working on and the struggles along the way. That’s why network membership is so valuable. The owners get the [...]
Let’s say you have an employee named Bob. He’s a great employee. Not just great, stellar. You can’t see the agency functioning without him. You don’t want to lose him. So how do you ensure that he’s happy and not being wooed by a competitor? Or maybe you’re 55 and beginning to think about your [...]
On your mark, get set, be creative! Wouldn’t it be awesome if being creative on demand was that easy? And it’s not just confined to your creative department anymore. Today, everyone at the agency has to be creative whether it’s your account service team bringing fresh business ideas to clients, your biz dev team trying [...]
How much of your day do you spend working ON your business as opposed to working IN your business? If you’re like most agency owners, you are too busy fighting fires day to day to even think about anything else, let alone focus on the visionary work needed to move your business forward. It’s important [...]
I was co-teaching a workshop on managing a multi-generational agency this week and one of the topics we covered was "interview questions for millennials" but I'm here to tell you -- these are killer questions for candidates of any agency or potential position. Remember to be a better interviewer, you need to be a better [...]
You know my drill – you’ve taken a huge risk in starting or buying an agency. I want to make sure you get the rewards that should accompany those risks. Most agencies have a few KPI (key performance indicators) or agency metrics they track. Unfortunately, most agencies track the wrong ones, like gross billings. I [...]
