AMI Videos

It’s time to be bold

At this moment, there's a lot of pause, and there's a lot of fear that has caused everybody to freeze. What we're hearing from agencies all across the world, but particularly here in the United States, is that the pipeline has just dried up, that clients and prospects don't want to talk about more budget or a new budget. They're frozen in place as they wait for things to settle down, for the tariff talks to change, for some certainty to come into this great uncertainty. We're also seeing that same behavior showing up in agencies and agency owners that you, too, have paused. You're not initiating big new programs. You are not creating new things for prospects, clients, and team members. I want to challenge you in this: right now, while the world is watching and waiting, we don't have to watch and wait. We have all this control over our own business. We can't control what the economy is doing, our worldview, or what's happening politically, but we can control how we show up in our own businesses. Watch »

Knowledge Sharing

One of the conversations we're having with many agency owners these days is how to take the knowledge that one person or one department has inside the agency and infuse it through the entire organization. Knowledge sharing around clients, around the industries you serve, is becoming more and more critical as we look to grow our existing client base, as we look to serve our clients better, to be more valuable to them, to increase their spending with us year over year, it requires us to have a depth of knowledge around their specific business, around the industry they serve, around the work we do, and of course, the work that we do on their behalf, the marketing work. But in many cases, that information is siloed inside of the account service department or some of your production people. Or it might even be siloed with you, the agency owner or an agency leader. We have to build infrastructure inside our agencies for internal education programs. One of the things I want you to think about for 2025 is how to ensure that knowledge is not isolated in a person or department. Watch »

Bonus Criteria

As agency owners, we make a couple critical mistakes when it comes to giving bonuses. The first one is that we just give out money in the fourth quarter because we have money left over. And so we “reward” people. But we haven't done anything to change their behavior throughout the year, to get them to earn that money and to understand how they can help the agency have even more money at the end of the year. And number two, we structure bonus programs based on longevity rather than tying it to KPIs that are something that everyone in your organization can achieve. Watch »

Time to Raise Prices

Many of you are realizing that your expenses have been rising for the last several years. The one thing that hasn't changed is how you price. Several folks are asking how I can have this conversation with clients and how I can have this conversation with prospects. The good news is that with prospects, the conversation is pretty straightforward. This is what we charge. Most of you don't actually talk about an hourly rate with your clients. 99% of you are project-based, which means clients want a thing or a series of things, and you're going to give them a flat fee for the delivery of those things. So it might be strategy, monthly PPC or SEO campaign, or something else, but you're not really unraveling for them your hourly rate. You're just saying you want these deliverables. And here's the price. So for prospects, it's pretty easy. You need to start calculating your prices based on a minimum of $175 an hour. Here's how you have that conversation with your clients. Watch »

Growing our clients

It can be a struggle to help your account service team understand that it's their job to grow their book of business by 10%, to grow the clients they already serve. And that part of the problem is they don't know how. And it starts with them not understanding a) it’s their role. But then they have no infrastructure or way to measure or a way to help each other or a roadmap of how to grow their existing clients. A lot of AEs will say, well, this is their budget, and I'm not a salesperson. It's not actually about being a salesperson, as you know. Watch »

What’s missing from your job descriptions?

We're working on a set of job description templates for members. One of the things that we're realizing is that one of the elements that most job descriptions are missing, which I think is actually one of the most critical elements of a job description, is KPIs. Measurable, attainable, objective ways for you and your employees to measure their performance. It shouldn't be a huge, long list. It doesn't need to be 10 or 15 KPIs, but 5 to 6 KPIs that are very specific to their job that will be a way for you and them to keep score. One of the things we know about today's employees is that they're very anxious to sort of have a checklist of what doing a good job means. What it looks like and your job description is your first opportunity to give them that sort of template or checklist of how to show up as a great AE or a great copywriter or whatever their role is. But 95% of the job descriptions we see coming from all of you don't have specific KPIs. It may have vague language around listing their responsibilities, but it doesn't say how you will measure their performance. And for you and the employee, one of the realizations is that today's employees want specifics, and then they will work very hard to hit those specifics. Watch »

Continual Improvement

For most of us, one of our goals is to keep our employees for a long time. When we have a great team member, we want them to stick around. There are significant economic and emotional and sort of systemic reasons why we wish long-term employees. But what we also want from our long-term employees is that they keep getting better. We work in an industry where if we don't keep learning and we don't keep improving, we very quickly can become obsolete. So one of the things you need to do inside your agency is build in the reinforcement that no matter how good you are today, you need to keep getting better. And the best way to do that is in your one-on-one meetings with every single employee. We shouldn't be rewarding employees for longevity. We should be rewarding employees for the contributions they make to the agency. And part of the contribution we need every single team member to make is that they keep getting better. So you need to build in systems and process inside your organization to not only encourage improvement, but to reward improvement. So don't leave it to chance. Build a program into your agency so that every employee keeps getting better and better over time. Watch »

Surprise!

We are staying at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel, which is a vast hotel. One of the things that's been really interesting about our stay here is that they've done a fantastic job of sort of weaving in some surprises. It's all under a dome, and there are over 50,000 trees and plants inside the hotel, growing live inside this dome. But anyway, it's this amazing environment that you walk around, and it feels like you're outside. It smells like you're outside. And so there are many natural surprises baked into just wandering the hotel, trying to find your room. But beyond that, they do all kinds of interesting things: light shows and music shows throughout the day and the evening. They've got a riverboat. But what I find fascinating is they don't tell you that all these things are here. They let you discover them, they let them be a surprise. And I thought, as we were watching this light show last night, that was a surprise. We often talk about clients who don't like surprises, and they don't when it comes to deadlines or budgets or things like that. But I think everybody likes delightful surprises, surprises that demonstrate that someone's thinking about them and that they are going a little above and beyond. And I don't know that we are thoughtful about baking in that kind of surprise into our client interactions. And so my challenge to you is when was the last time you surprised a client by just doing something that would delight them, that showed that you were thinking of them, that you cared, or something a little something extra that they're not expecting for no other reason than to make them happy. And if your answer is, which I guess I'm going to think, most – for most of you- we don't do that very often. My suggestion is that you spend some time thinking about how you could delight your clients and surprise them in a way that makes them feel special, appreciated, and seen. Watch »

What role should your AE play?

The reality is that today, all of you have a choice. Your account people can be trained and groomed and held responsible for being the strategic Sherpas of your clients, guiding them in business decisions and marketing decisions, really being their thinking partner or they can be the relationship holders. And it's not that they can't do a little bit of both, but you have to decide where you'll lean in with your training, your recruitment, who you keep, and how you groom and grow your account service team. A strategic business partner is very different from someone who just takes the order, ensures the work gets done on time, and builds a relationship with the client. As you think about that, don't forget to do the math. What would that mean for you on the salary side, on the payroll side? So there's no right or wrong. And for many of you, there's a clear path one way or the other. And in some cases, that depends on the sophistication level of your clients; it might be dependent on the kind of work that you do for clients. It might be dependent on the people you already have on staff. How do you want to show up in front of clients and prospects, and how do you want them to see the account service people and where they get their strategy? Worth giving some thought. Watch »