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Your boat can only carry so much weight

Agency owners are, for the most part, some of the bravest people I know.  They have put everything on the line to start/own their agency and every day, they face and move past tough decisions. But if there’s an Achilles Heel for most owners, it’s the staffing issue, especially if your agency has hit a rough spot. It’s ironic but in a typical agency, the higher a person’s salary, the less billable client work they do. They’re running a department, doing admin work or chasing after new clients more than serving your clients. I’m not suggesting their work isn’t valuable. It just isn’t billable. What balances that out is that most of your younger, less expensive employees are very billable. Their billable hours cover the non-billable hours of the more senior staff.  If you look at all of the hours your agency employees (including the owner) works — you need to be at 60% billable overall.  Most agencies struggle to get into the 50-55% range.  Which is why you aren’t making the kind of money you’d like to make. Unfortunately, many of you are out of proportion. You’re over-staffed in general and in particular, you’re top heavy. You might have a large leadership team or multiple owners. On top of that — you’ve got an employee or two (or more) who have been with you for a very long time. You’ve given them regular raises and now, if you’re honest with yourself, they’re overpaid.  Odds are, their skills sets and energy aren’t really what they used to be. But you feel a loyalty to them and so they stay. You’ve been okay with a net profit that’s nowhere near the ideal range and you’ve stayed [...]

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Why Your Agency Should Implement a Value Added Marketing Strategy with Sam Mallikarjunan

Our job as an agency is to provide value to our clients and help them woo and win their best potential customers. After all, marketing, according to Peter Drucker, is about understanding the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself. Value added marketing is one way to do exactly that. Agencies are under the same gun – we have to be able to demonstrate value. But the game has changed and many agency owners are trying to re-tool their shop in today’s new selling environment. That’s why I knew I wanted to interview Sam Mallikarjunan, Marketing Fellow and Head of Growth at Hubspot Labs. Sam teaches advanced digital marketing at Harvard and has insight into how successful agencies are selling today and keeping clients by defining and delivering value. Sam will encourage you to roll up your sleeves and really dig into your client’s business so you can help them make sense of all the information that is out there today, understand what needs to be done with and how to measure that information and be a driving force to get it all done. Join Sam and I as we discover all the ways you can provide value to your clients and your own shop with: The way the internet has changed selling so that there’s almost too much information How salespeople can help consumers sift through the breadth of information out there Structuring sales calls so they’re all about asking the buyers questions about their business The power of inbound: competition where no one else is competing Learning to say no to bad revenue Why you need to build buyer personas -- both for your ideal customers and [...]

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Everything You Need to Know About Working at a Virtual Company with Gerald Sexton

Technology has brought many changes to the workplace and one of the biggest has to be the ability and desire to work remotely. Many agencies swore they’d never allow an employee to work from home – be it down the street or across the country.  That tune has changed for sure. Some agencies are making the shift to a work-from-home environment a few days a week or a hybrid agency where some of the staff is in common shared office space and others are scattered around the country.  Today, in our AMI owner peer networks – several of the agencies have taken the plunge and gone totally virtual. My podcast guest Gerald Sexton is the head of HR at a company called Goodway Group.  Goodway is an agency that specializes in programmatic media and they are 100% virtual.  Going all out virtual may not be right for you or your agency at this very moment but Gerald gives us some food for thought with regards to this changing workplace environment and how we can best adapt. If his retention and production numbers have anything to say about it, going virtual has been nothing but great for his agency. Join Gerald and I as we wade into these changes and give you some things to consider by learning: The history of Goodway Group Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about working at a virtual company How Goodway succeeds with a virtual company with employees in 41 states The best tools for managing a virtual company What Gerald looks for in the hiring process to figure out if someone is suited for the hiring process or not Why Goodway looks at their team members results -- not [...]

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Building An Internal Content Strategy for the Long Haul

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” as a marketing tool, especially with how popular and buzzworthy this phrase has become of late. So why do so many agencies fail at creating compelling stories? Here are a few points to pass on the road map to successful conversation building. Create Useful Content Creating and utilizing content is deceivingly simple to describe but incredibly difficult to do well. When you create content that speaks to your clients’ needs, you’ll capture their interest. If you go out of your way to be helpful and relevant, they’ll want to talk to you about the content. If your content helps them get more of what they want, like sales, or less of what they don’t want, like wasted time, you’ll be perceived as credible. Stories to Start Conversations Credibility is established by the value of what you share. It’s no different from having a regular conversation with someone. We all want to keep talking to people who are interesting to us, as well as people whose words are relevant to our own lives and experiences. If we’re introduced to someone who just talks about themselves or about topics we don't care about, we’re much less likely to stay engaged in the conversation. As an agency, you have to make the conversation about your clients, their needs and what they care about. Don’t tell them how great your business is; show them how much your business could help them. Create client-centered conversations. They should walk away intrigued [...]

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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” as a marketing tool, especially with how popular and buzzworthy this phrase has become of late. So why do so many agencies fail at creating compelling stories? Here are a few points to pass on the road map to successful conversation building. Create Useful Content Creating and utilizing content is deceivingly simple to describe but incredibly difficult to do well. When you create content that speaks to your clients’ needs, you’ll capture their interest. If you go out of your way to be helpful and relevant, they’ll want to talk to you about the content. If your content helps them get more of what they want, like sales, or less of what they don’t want, like wasted time, you’ll be perceived as credible. Stories to Start Conversations Credibility is established by the value of what you share. It’s no different from having a regular conversation with someone. We all want to keep talking to people who are interesting to us, as well as people whose words are relevant to our own lives and experiences. If we’re introduced to someone who just talks about themselves or about topics we don't care about, we’re much less likely to stay engaged in the conversation. As an agency, you have to make the conversation about your clients, their needs and what they care about. Don’t tell them how great your business is; show them how much your business could help them. Create client-centered conversations. They should walk away intrigued [...]

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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 processes to guide workflow, even though they’re necessary. Unfortunately, this misstep can singlehandedly create chaos in a busy advertising agency. Common Ad Agency Mistakes Most agencies rob themselves of income when they don’t track and bill work correctly. With these small additional revenue streams, the average agency could grow its bottom line by several percentage points every year—if not more. In addition, without continuous revenue growth, it’s tough to keep hiring and training, which can lead to increased turnover and stale ideas. Ultimately, that can result in an agency that isn’t a creative force any longer. It’s simply a production house, rather than a generator of innovation. In today’s environment, this is a risk that most agencies simply can’t afford. With a mix of employees and freelancers working together in different cities and time zones, process and project management become vital to ensuring proper billing, communication and project completion. Otherwise, details are dropped, deadlines are missed, clients leave and the bottom line takes a sharp dive into the red. It doesn’t have to be this way. 10 Tips for a Competitive Advantage Here are 10 ways to give your advertising agency a streamlined process and a competitive edge. Have a production process, and honor it. It’s important to create clear, easy-to-follow workflows for every kind of project. This ensures that steps aren’t missed and that the final product has been vetted at each essential stage. Create a culture that won’t honor workarounds for anyone—even the [...]

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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 not what they need to thrive. The difference between surviving and thriving often boils down to whether or not a business is overstaffing. A company can be too lean, yet smart business owners always know the people they want to hire next. Training new employees every few months is a drain on your time and resources, yet carrying more overhead than your business can handle could also destroy your company. You have to know how many people you need to power your company, when you need to grow, and when you have just the right number of employees. Tracking a few key metrics will show how much work needs to be done and how many people you need to do it. Start by monitoring these three areas: 1. Keep track of your forward-thinking metrics Most companies don’t have a steady income each month. If you have a comprehensive view of your financial landscape, you’ll be better equipped to weather the ebb and flow of cash flow. Of course, you can’t react to every fluctuation — but you’ll be able to tell the difference between a seasonal slump and a significant downturn so that you can react quickly and intelligently. Most firms’ incomes fluctuate dramatically throughout the year. Here are some basic metrics you should track: • A long-range view of company cash flow. Start with a solid understanding of your industry’s standards and best practices, and then build a map of when your company’s income peaks. [...]

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EOS Model: Why Your Agency Needs a Visionary and an Integrator with Mark Winters

Most agency owners are visionaries – able to see the future and come up with idea after idea to keep their agency on top of things. But most agency owners struggle to move those ideas forward on their own. They need an integrator to help them get things done – to wade through the details and processes. The integrator is the one to follow through and put the visionary’s ideas into practice. This perfect combination of visionary and integrator is what my podcast guest Mark Winters focuses on in his book, Rocket Fuel. Mark is a Certified EOS Implementer, working with agencies to identify this combination of the “visionary” who makes it up and the “integrator” who makes it happen and puts them together within a framework that will get your agency to extraordinary. See how identifying the visionary and the integrator in your agency can push you to the next level of success by learning: The “visionary” and the “integrator” from “Rocket Fuel” by Gino Wickman and Mark C. Winters How visionaries and integrators can build trust so that integrators can take control of what visionaries create What business owners need to do when they are an integrator and they need a visionary (most owners are visionaries) If you are a visionary, how to determine if you have an integrator on your team and what to do if you don’t The seven-step visionary integrator connection process for finding the right integrator How to know if you’re going to be able to sell your agency to your integrator or not (and what your exit plan can look like in both scenarios) Things that make visionary-integrator relationships fall apart The five rules and five tools for [...]

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Small business advice: Surviving Spiking Health Insurance Costs

Small business owners have a lot to consider when it comes to employee benefits. Health insurance costs have been rising steadily, and with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, many small firms may see a further increase in their premiums. Nevertheless, employers know that robust benefits packages are a huge draw for talented workers and a key component of employee retention. To prevent larger organizations from poaching their best people, small business owners are looking for more affordable ways to take care of their employees — and it isn’t all about health care. So how can small firms compete? The solution may lie in customization. Employee needs vary by generation These days, one-size-fits-all benefits packages simply don’t make sense, especially for small employers. Consider the multigenerational nature of most workforces, with each subsequent generation demanding different perks: • Maturists (born before 1945): For this group, stability is key. A lifetime job, homeownership, and a comfortable retirement mean everything. They’re looking for a hefty retirement plan and solid financial counseling. • Baby Boomers (born 1945-1960): Boomers want the job security that will allow them to live large, both before and after retirement. They want retirement plans, time off for vacations and hobbies, wellness programs, and long-term health insurance. • Generation X (born 1961-1980): This generation is focused on achieving work/life balance, and a bigger paycheck will offset the loss of certain benefits. They enjoy companies that allow flextime and remote work and seek benefits that serve them outside the workplace, such as pet insurance or adoption cost benefits. • Generation Y (born 1981-1995): The first digitally native generation craves freedom and flexibility. Most will not stay in their current jobs for the long haul, so they [...]

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Types of Agencies: What Kind of Agency Do You Want to Build?

Agencies face all sorts of challenges as they struggle to decide what kinds of clients to serve and what kinds of deliverables to offer, and there are many different types of agencies you can be as well. For this special solocast (it’s our 100th episode!), I want to get you thinking about what kind of agency it is that you are trying to build and nurture. Some agencies build custom solutions for every client – a very labor intensive, creative endeavor. Others have a more limited list of services and products and do less custom work. There are pros and cons with each but you really need to decide which makes more sense, based on your goals. Problems tend to arise when these types of agencies don’t make a conscious choice as to which kind of agency they would like to build and nurture. Both are fine choices but you have to make a choice. Join me in determining which kind of an agency you are suited to build and why. We’ll cover: Two types of agencies: “Artisan bakery agencies” (every project they produce is custom made for a client) and “Wonder Bread factory agencies” (where they follow systems and processes to produce the same limited set of things for every client) Why clients often work with both of these kinds of agencies, sometimes even at the same time Misconceptions owners of both kinds of agencies have about each other Assessing what type of agency you own (and why it may fall in the middle of these two types) Some of the pros of running an “Artisan bakery agency”: you can hire millennials, you can be a partner for your clients, and the prestige that [...]

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