Agency Tips

One two punch

I've been thinking a lot about accountability lately as I've been building out our new Sales Momentum Learning Lab, which is all based on this idea of baking in accountability, where the participants have to respond to me and give me an update every week on what they're doing and the power of knowing that you have to sort of be held accountable by someone. I've been thinking about that, and about what I'm watching, what I'm observing, and what I know from my own experience, and I know that accountability is a one-two punch. The first part of that punch is the plan that you've got to have a system, a plan, a commitment. Like, I have to state what I'm going to do, when I'm going to do it, and how I'm going to get it done. So part one is you have to have a plan. You have to know what I need to deliver. When do I need to deliver it by? And most importantly, how am I going to get that done? And when I say it's not just an intellectual exercise, I mean baking it into your calendar. It tells people you're carving out time for it. Whatever it is, in many cases, we need a wingman who will help us set and accomplish that goal. So this week, I want to focus on the first half, which is what's the plan? What is that thing on your to-do list? That is really pretty mission critical to your business, but it's probably mission critical in a bigger way, in a more substantial direction-changing way. It is writing the book. It is launching a podcast. It is getting the documents ready to apply to speak at a big conference. It's something big that, if you don't do it, nobody but you will notice. But the business will see. So what is it? When does it have to be done by, and give yourself some grace? What's my plan? What do I need to deliver and when? And who's my wingman? Who's already done it before or can coach or encourage or nag me along the way to make sure that I actually honor how I'm going to get it done? And then how do I bake it into my day, my week, my month, and make sure that nothing gets in the way of me getting that done? That's part one! Watch »

Hang tough at the plate

2025 has been a challenging year for many of you. And I think that you are looking down the barrel of 26 and wondering, how do you show up? How do you bring AI into your business? How do you stay relevant to your clients? How do you level up your presence for them? And I want to remind you that this year's World Series is a perfect example of what we need to do, which is you keep going up to the plate. You just keep taking those swings. You keep playing the game. And you experiment. You experiment with different pitchers. You experiment with different batters. You experiment with how the other team is playing, or in our case, how clients in the marketplace are reacting. But you, you absolutely stay tenacious. One of the traits that is true about almost every agency owner I meet is that they're stubborn. You won't give up. You are not going to walk away. You are not going to throw the game. You are – you're going to hang in there, and you are going to figure out a way to win the game. And that's what I want to say to you this week: you will figure out a way to win the game. Surround yourself with other agency owners. Join our Facebook group and participate in the activities we have going on. But lean in. Connect with different owners. Learn what other people are doing. And stay tenacious. Just keep swinging the bat. Sooner or later, you, just like Freddie Freeman, will hit that ball out of the park, and you will win the game. Watch »

A different take on strategic planning

It feels a little disruptive out there right now. Between AI and some economic challenges, we're in a moment where we have to reinvent a bit. That the status quo —the same thing—is not going to hold well in 2026. And so, as we come into this fourth quarter of 2025, many of you are holding your year-end retreats and strategic planning sessions, and we believe you need to ask some questions that will get you thinking a little differently about the business and how you want to show up in 2026. It's not just about thinking differently. We want you to think more boldly. Please ask more complex questions this year. It feels like this is a year when the status quo won't be enough, and I want to make sure you're ready for 2026. Watch »

Biggest Bang for Your Buck

We are in the fourth quarter, the final days, the last stretch, 90 days left to make 2025 a significant year for our agencies and to tee us up for a great 2026. So what do we do that will have the most impact in these last 90 days? Many of you are familiar with the 80/20 rule or the Pareto principle, which says that 80% of our results will come from focusing on 20% of what matters most. So, that might be the 20% of your clients that generate 80% of the revenue. That might be the 20% of your team that you get the most bang for your buck, and that are delivering exceptional results. That might be the 20% of your new business effort that seems to be catching on and bringing you new opportunities. But this video reminds you that it is time to narrow your focus. You need to invest more energy in a finite group of people, activities, focus areas, content creation, whatever it is for you that you know you're going to get the biggest bang for your buck. Watch »

Creating Scarcity

Some agencies are doing some very interesting things with the scarcity principle—this idea of FOMO. We hate to miss out on something. And if something is a limited release or only available for a certain amount of time, we've seen in our own consumer lives that that can motivate a purchase. So some agencies are combining their desire to experiment with AI or other technologies with the idea of scarcity. They're reaching out to clients and offering a limited number of seats in a “beta test” or an experiment that only runs for a certain period of time. Only so many clients are allowed to take advantage of this. And what they're doing is they're actually able to sell some new projects to clients by packaging them as something new, a beta or an experiment. But number two, they add the scarcity model by saying that we're only going to do this through October, or we only have room for 3 or 4 clients to do this beta test. How might you use the scarcity model and the fear of missing out to get some of your clients or prospects to move quickly to a buying decision? Watch »

Slow and Steady

It's fascinating to think about how powerful water is. It consistently and steadily does the same thing over and over. And over time, that consistency allows it to reshape landmasses, change the way our weather behaves, and have a global impact simply by doing the same thing over and over and over again in small, minute ways. So you watch the tide come in, you watch the tide go out. I think sometimes we think, with AI and everything else going on in our world, that we have to make these massive, dramatic changes in our business to make our company better or stronger or bigger or more profitable. And the reality is the agencies that are sort of slow and steady, that do the right things consistently over and over and over again, are the agencies that historically perform better and grow consistently year over year. And, you know, we see the financials of hundreds of agencies. And I can tell you, it is not the agencies that make these dramatic sorts of swings. Still, the agency owners and the agency leadership team get better and better by doing the same thing and just making it incrementally better each time they do it nice and steady, knowing it's the right thing to do. So, as we go into the fourth quarter of 2025, what I want to ask you is, what could you do with more consistency? What could you do in a more steady, repeatable fashion that you know would, over time, build the strength and profitability of your agency? Watch »

Depth and breadth

There are probably more than a few agencies that do not think about how the world views them, how prospects or even their clients view them, and they don't have a strategy for expanding that lens so that the world can better understand the depth and breadth of what they do. The risk, of course, is that it's easy to quickly become pigeonholed as the fill-in-the-blank agency: the PPC agency, the newsletter agency, the web building agency, whatever it is. You have to decide if that's good for your business or not so good. If you want the prospects and the clients around you to better understand the depth and breadth of what you offer, you need to have a concentrated plan and effort to help them know that you do more than what they think you do. By the way, that is not filling your newsletter with talking about yourself. It is about your thought leadership, what you teach, how you teach it, where you teach it, and what you talk about on your social channels. But it doesn't happen by accident. So if you don't want to be a one-trick pony or be known just for country music, you will have to do something about it. And it's worth talking about and putting together a plan. Watch »

What do you cause?

There's not an agency owner on the planet who is not thinking about how technology, AI, freelancers, the cut—the-contract-economy gig—all of those things are influencing what we sell to clients and what they want from us. And one of the things we've seen for years in our Agency Edge studies is that the demand for making things, the things that we as agencies sort of historically have always done, whether it's making TV spots or radio spots or producing podcasts or producing digital ads, all of those things, the demand for those is going down. And the increase is the strategy. The increase is the thinking. The increase is what or how we should talk about the client's business as opposed to the stuff that we make. It's not that agencies aren't still making money when they make stuff, but the demand for that is reducing, and the tolerance for paying for that stuff in terms of paying $175 or more an hour is also dropping. And so as you look at the future of your business and you say to yourself, between AI and the gig economy and all these other things, what do clients really want from me? That's a very worthy question to ask yourself to be saying, okay, not only this year, but next year and in three years, what do I think? Where do I think that puck is going, and how do I move my agency that way? I was doing a podcast interview with a really interesting gentleman from the UK named Robin Bunn, and he said something that really stuck with me. He was talking about how agencies aren't great at differentiating themselves, aren't great at talking about how they are different from their competitors. And he said this sentence, which has just been banging around in my head, and I want it to bang around in your head. Watch »

What do they do wrong?

When we wrote the book Sell With Authority, one of the things we really emphasized was the need to differentiate your agency, to look, sound, feel, and be different from all the other agencies out there. Otherwise, you just make it harder for prospects to choose you. One of the things that I think people get stuck on when they differentiate themselves is that they think it's all about who they serve. And that's absolutely important. Having a niche and serving a subset of all humanity in all businesses is important, but it's also how you serve them, what you do for them, and what you believe. We talk a lot in the book about your point of view, which brings a unique perspective to your work. So as I think about that, that's often for agencies, one of the hardest things for them to land on is their point of view. What is their core belief? So, at AMI, the example we always give: At AMI, our core belief is that most agency owners are accidental business owners. They're great at the client-facing work. They know how to do that. But the actual running of their business in a profitable, sustainable, scalable way is something that they haven't been taught. That's something they didn't learn at school. That's where AMI steps in, and it is helpful. And so think of it that way. What do you know about your audience that most people don't know or ignore, that you can actually help with, that you could lean into? So one question I want you to ask yourself as you think about this is... Watch »