AMI Videos

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 »

Don’t avoid the hard conversation

We're human beings. We're going to make mistakes. But how we handle those mistakes determines how the client feels about the agency and our brand. One of the best skills that your account people and other client-facing folks need to have is the ability to face bad news, hard news, and mistakes with clients with as much candor as possible. We have to know that the relationship is much bigger than whatever the situation is in the moment, and we have to take care of the relationship first and the situation second. And by doing that with respect to the audience, with understanding that we're going to disappoint them, frustrate them, or make them mad. Our job is to do that as kindly and as early as possible with respect, and to treat them like grown-ups. That's what saves the day. Let's make sure that when there are problems in our agencies—because they're bound to be—we handle them with grace, respect, and candor so that we don't damage the relationship much deeper than the situation calls for. 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 »

Reciprocity

One of the most powerful laws out there is the law of reciprocity. And the law of reciprocity says that when someone gives us something of value — genuine value, not with a hook, not with a string, but true genuine value — that we immediately do two things inside. Number one, it elevates our level of trust in them. And number two, it triggers a social desire to give back. So agencies and brands have known for years that if they are generous with something, their audience, whoever that may be, responds well in kind. So I've seen a lot of agencies try to do things like a free audit or other things like that that allow someone to sample them. But the challenge with reciprocity is that it's a well-oiled machine and a well-used tactic. And so the trick is that reciprocity has to be literally no strings attached. So when you offer me a free audit, what do I expect? I expect that you're going to try and sell me something, which diminishes the value of not only what you've given me for free—“for free”—but also makes me wary. So instead of going into that relationship with trust, I'm suddenly on guard because I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. I'm waiting for you to say, "Well, now that I've given you the assessment, here's what we can do for you for money, or here's what would be the next logical step." You have to remove the hook when you offer something in your new business efforts that is a free sort of hook. It has to be given without any hooks or an ask. You absolutely can leave a door open for whoever gets that free audit, or whatever it may be, to ask you for more, or to say, you know what, tell me more about your services. But you have to stop short, one step short of going in for the sale. And that is tough for agencies. So if you're thinking about doing something, as a free offer, you're offering a free Q&A, you are doing something like a free audit. You are willing to do a strategy session with someone. You're willing to have an initial call about their business rather than your business. Whatever it is, catch yourself before you ask for the sale. Next time, stop one step short of where you normally stop and watch the good things that happen. 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 »

Check in

In the last couple of weeks, we have talked to several clients who got some bad news from their clients, which was that we're not renewing contracts. We're not happy. We want a new account exec. We are going to another agency. Some level of “we are unhappy” news. Several times, when the agency owner jumped on a call, picked up the phone, or sent an email to that client to find out what happened, the message they got from the client was the same. Which is why you are asking now? Why haven't you asked over the last three months, six months, nine months, a year? Why is this the time that I'm hearing from you now that I'm ready to cancel my contract or cut back my budget, or in some way impact you financially? Now all of a sudden you care. And you know, at AMI, we always talk about how agency owners need to invest a certain amount of their time in what we call “Client Love.” That's just cultivating relationships with the clients, spending time with the clients, as high up the food chain as you can go, but that you're having conversations that only business owners or business leaders can have with other business owners and business leaders. If something's not quite right, you want to hear about it on the early end, not on the way out the door end. And that doesn't happen if you don't cultivate the relationship before there's trouble. So if you don't have booked into your schedule client-love time, today is the day to start booking that time with all of your clients. Watch »

Are you meeting your client’s expectations?

We were just with a peer group, and one of our conversations was around how often we should be taking new ideas to clients. How often should we be trying to show them that we're thinking about them? And again, let's reframe the word “sell” so that we're not trying to sell them something they don't need. We're not trying to sell them something to benefit us, but we are trying to help them by having ideas that will help them hit their KPIs and grow their business. And how often should we do that in a way that doesn't feel like we're always putting our hand in their pocket? Well, when we look back at the Agency Edge research over the last several years, particularly the year when we specifically said to clients: How, when, and where do you give your agencies more budget? One of the facts that we talked about yesterday, which was a great reminder to everybody, is that clients expect, and I want to underline the word expect. Clients expect us to bring them new ideas consistently—not once a year, not in a big dog and pony show, but on a regular basis. So that's why Danyel and I wrote the new workshop, Growing Your Existing Clients, which we're teaching again in September. In that workshop, we identified a whole bunch of places where you should talk to your clients about new ideas. So here's your homework for today. I want you to go back, talk to your account service team, and document how often you present new ideas to your clients. I'm going to bet it is not as often as it should be. Remember, clients expect us to consistently deliver new ideas to them. 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 »