Organizations that don’t have a set of guiding principles find themselves struggling to be consistent and to always be moving towards their bigger picture goals. A lack of defined expectations also makes it difficult for your team to understand what makes an effective leader. If you don’t give them a sense of what the company [...]
Working at an agency means you get to hang out with smart, creative people all day long. It also means you’re dealing with a lot of strong personalities — imaginative, outspoken, and sometimes a bit too confident. When you step into agency leadership, you have to transition from collaborating with these personalities to managing them. [...]
You’ve poured a lot of time and effort into building your business and watching it grow. In fact, you’ve probably built a contingency plan to troubleshoot any emergency that’s thrown your way, but what you may not have thought about is an exit strategy. OK, maybe you don’t feel ready to retire or even plan for [...]
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 [...]
