Podcasts

At AMI we preach the idea of building your wealth outside your agency, while you still own your agency. Sadly, many owners leave too much in retained earnings inside the agency and over time, they piddle that money away. Every agency owner deserves to profit from the risk they took to start the business and […]

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a hot topic but many agency owners wonder how, exactly, it can benefit their shop. They get how it works but they think that either a) they don’t understand it enough to deliver on it for clients or b) they can’t afford the AI tools out there for agencies. The truth […]

Back in the good old days (pre great recession) agencies used research to make their work smarter and more effective. But it became a luxury we trimmed out as we had to squeeze budgets. As we emerged from the recession, we dismissed research as expensive and didn’t build it into our recommendations as often as […]

One of the biggest bottlenecks in many agencies is that the agency owner is the only person who can develop strategies for clients or new business pitches. As you know, this causes a host of problems, not the least of which is then the agency owner can’t focus on doing his/her job. Most owners feel […]

Over the last couple of years, many agencies have started reaping the benefits of embedding an account executive in a client’s office. By that I mean someone from the agency team literally has a desk or office in a client’s business for a set amount of time every week. This trend was growing prior to […]

Who is responsible for keeping the agency’s work on time and on budget? That is an oft debated topic among agency owners. At AMI we believe that a specific role (Project Manager, Traffic Manager, etc.) to keep everyone and everything on track is a luxury if you have fewer than 10 employees and by the […]

The reality is, we spend so much time thinking and worrying about business development, and in most cases that exuberance is not really matched with the same level of excitement for our existing clients. Which is crazy because we all know that clients get much more profitable the longer we keep them. Despite knowing that […]

Leadership can feel like a loaded word. We often think about leadership as defining how you run your business but, to me, that refers to how you manage, not how you lead. Leadership is how you show up, and great leadership isn’t just about getting people to do what you want, it’s about inspiring them […]

Think about how you build out journey maps or of journey maps you’ve seen if that isn’t something your agency does. They chart out how a potential customer goes from not being aware of the product or service to the point of purchase. Typically, we’re building this journey map to coincide with our work in […]

As we celebrate the most anticipated New Year’s Day in any of our lifetimes, we also find ourselves planning, goal settings, and making resolutions for the new year. Whenever I ask an agency owner what goals they’ve set for their shop, without exception, the first goal (and often the only goal) they can come up […]