Every week, Drew records another video on a topic that has come up in his conversations with agency owners. You can view them chronologically (most recent on top) by different categories, or you can search for specific key words.
This Week’s Video
AI is not optional for agencies
Any agency that shuns all AI and stays completely old school, whatever that means today, is an agency that most clients will feel is out of touch. They'll believe their agency is not bringing them all the resources they can and feels dated. It would be best to decide what AI means for your agency and how you use it to serve clients. How do you use it internally for systems and processes? How do you use it to crunch data, gather facts, and research? It can do many things; you don't have to do all of them in your agency. But not understanding AI, not experimenting with AI, not having a policy inside your organization about internal use, and not having a client-facing policy about how your views about AI will translate to your clients and prospects down the road means that you are out of touch. Full Transcripts »
What do you want your team to feel?
As agency owners and leaders, we are the messengers. We set the tone and tenor of how people feel about working in the agency. I don't think we spend enough time thinking about how we want to kick off our all-team or state-of-the-agency meetings and how we want them to walk away from those meetings. What do we want them to know? And, more importantly, what do we want them to feel? So before your next all-team meeting, think carefully about the chaos of all the messages you have to deliver because you have 30 minutes an hour or 90 minutes of stuff to tell them. But how do you bookend that with how you want them to feel? Watch »
Autumnal Truths
Are there things in the fall season of their life cycle in our agency? Maybe it's how we work, maybe it's where we work, maybe it's the kind of clients we serve. Maybe it's an employee or two who have been amazing, but maybe it's their autumn season, and we need to help them figure out how to have a good last chapter through the winter of their career. Maybe it is the way we do billing; maybe it's the way we do new business. But I want you to challenge yourself as agency owners. It's so easy because there's so much chaos always going on around us. We want some stability, I get it. We want something that stays the same. But I think sometimes we cling to the past or things that we feel are evergreen, and maybe they're not. Watch »
Work ethics
There are many assumptions about our employees, the way they work, and their understanding of work. First, I think we assume that they know how we want them to work. Second, I think we assume that they know how we work. Third, I think we assume that there is no wiggle room in their perception of work. Want to know the fix? Keep listening. Watch »
No wonder you can’t make any money
We're working with two agencies with identical issues: They were struggling with timelines, profitability, and process and system bloat. Interestingly, they both recently changed to a new project management software and hired a consultant to help them map their processes. When we got in there, we discovered that the processes were bloated. People who weren't doing the work every day were the ones who had their hands in building out the process. They hadn't included the team as well; they should have to figure out how long things took and what the handoffs were. Instead, we found that with the consultant's help, the project management team had created a complicated, bloated, over-layered system and process that frankly meant that from the get-go, every project they bid on came in way over budget compared to everybody else. Number two, there were many steps in there they didn't need. Number three, they could not get profitable to save their life to get the work done. So, we had to deconstruct and reconstruct their processes to figure out precisely what it took to complete the work. Want to know the fix? Keep listening. Watch »
Ask more questions
Don't be afraid to ask questions. I've always thought that the smartest people in the rooms are the people who are asking great questions. One of the greatest compliments I think we can get as agency people is when a client or a prospect says to us, “Huh. Nobody's ever asked me that before. That's a fascinating question.” So don't be afraid to ask questions, whether publicly, so everyone can see your question and the answer, or privately, to either the prospect or the search firm. Do not be shy about asking questions. Questions don't make you look stupid. When you have thoughtful, deep questions, they actually make you look pretty smart. Watch »
Exclusivity
At AMI, we are firm believers that agencies need to be specialists -- niching in some way to differentiate themselves so they can claim a position of authority. But what do you do when a client wants exclusivity within that niche? Watch »
An Endorphin Boost
This is it — fourth quarter. It’s go time! Here are some ways you can boost your endorphins so you can fire up your team, fuel the passion you need to get to the finish line, and enjoy the journey. Watch »
An Expensive Delta
At AMI, we see the finances—P&L, balance sheet, and all the details—from hundreds of agencies a year. Once a year, we crawl through those finances and pull data points. We pull trends and things that we're seeing. And one of the most startling numbers that we calculated this year was the – the idea – we looked at the idea of, all right, if an employee spends X number of hours a year doing billable tasks, and a subset of those hours actually gets billed to a client, what's the delta? We write off time because we're overserving the client. Maybe our estimates are wrong. Maybe we've made mistakes. There are a variety of reasons why all of our billable time doesn't get translated into an invoice. But for whatever that reason is, the delta between the billable time and what we call utilize time, meaning it got used on an invoice, was, on average, across the board, about $40,000 per employee. Watch »
Making More Without Selling More
When agency owners think about gross billings or adjusted gross income, we immediately think we must sell more to make more money. And the reality is it is equally important that you do a couple of things. Number one, increase your hourly rate so you're not selling more stuff; you're just getting paid more for it. For most of you, you can't afford to charge less than $175 an hour here in the States. For other countries, it will be different based on your currency, but $175 an hour. Why? We used to say $150 an hour. But the truth is employment costs, benefit costs, all of that's gone up. We haven't raised our rates in forever. And so, if you are one of the laggards, we've been pushing on this $175 for about 18 months now. If you still haven't done it, now is the time. Maybe you can’t do it for existing contracts and clients, but you should do it for new clients or new projects. The second thing is being thoughtful about reducing waste. How do your people spend their time? How much of the billable time actually gets billed to a client? Reduce the amount of write-offs and over-servicing. If you can fix those two problems, you can add more money to the bottom line without selling another thing to another client or prospect. The other huge influencer of how you drop money to the bottom line is managing your cost of goods and ensuring that you're getting proper margin and markup on those costs if you're acting as the bank for a client. So if you are incurring those expenses, whether it's media, photography, or anything else, you are entitled to charge a margin or a markup on that to ensure you are being compensated for being their bank. Watch »
