AMI Videos

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 »

Facetime

Many research studies have proven that, unfortunately, when our employees leave, it's not that hard for them to leave us. But what makes it hard, what makes our job sticky, is that they don't want to leave their coworkers. They often have deep relationships with their coworkers that they don't want to sacrifice by taking a new job. Post-Covid, as more of us have gone hybrid or completely virtual, it's really challenging to create the kinds of relationships that feel sticky to your employees, where they feel like they have a vested interest in each other's success, personally and professionally. Watch »

What’s your Minnie Pearl pillow?

I've been thinking about how much I love being in a place that knows who it is and celebrates who they are and what makes them unique. Which, of course, made me think about you and us and how we create that sense of uniqueness with our clients and our prospects. Watch »

Details matter

We usually cover the big items, but we don't take the time to think about the tiny details that will surprise and delight our clients or our team. So, as you prepare to make a new business pitch, welcome a new employee to the team, or plan your agency get-together or retreat, I want you to think about the big things. But I also want you to give a lot of time and attention to the tiny details you could add, probably at minimal cost or extra effort. It's just – it's not that we don't want to do them, it's that we don't think about them. I want you to stop and ask yourself, where are some little things I could do to surprise and delight -- could be a meeting. It could be an event like an agency retreat. Again, it could be onboarding a new client, they’re coming into your office for the first time, or you're going to their office for the first time. It could be a conference. But take time to think about the tiny little details and what you could do to make that moment memorable and special, and something that people will take pictures of, brag about, or talk about those brag-worthy moments that we can create with a little extra effort. Watch »

Annual contracts?

One of the conversations we've been having with agency owners is the pros and cons of annual contracts, especially for ongoing offerings like web maintenance, SEO packages, or any other product or service. The conversations have circled around the idea that annual contracts invite clients to reconsider the purchase. Do they really want to renew for another year? A couple of agencies have talked about the success they've had with evergreen contracts, which have the annual increase built in, and there's a 30-, 60-, or 90-day out, but they are perpetual contracts that just keep going. So the question is -- are annual contracts really your smartest option? Watch »

Values guide decision making

As agency owners and leaders, we have to help our employees participate in decisions every day. Do your time sheets. Treat clients a certain way. Show up on time. How you dress for a Zoom call—these are just a few of the millions of decisions that impact our business. But if we don't come at those decisions, many of which are made independently of us, we can talk about how we want them to behave or the decisions we want them to make. But at the moment, our employees are making hundreds of decisions a day that impact the way the world sees our business. And I believe that one of the foundational tools that we should and could use to help our employees make better decisions is for them to understand the core values, foundational elements, and beliefs that our business is built on and that we really want to be defined by. We want to be graded on that. Watch »

Three kinds of growth goals

In our business, being irrelevant happens quickly. If we are not constantly learning, constantly stretching ourselves, exploring, and experimenting, it's easy to lose our edge and the ability to lead clients. This is why we are such big proponents of a) one-on-one meetings with your employees and b) inside those one-on-one meetings, making sure that the very first topic of conversation every time you meet with them is their quarterly growth goals. And they should have 3 different types of growth goals per quarter. Watch »

It starts with being known

For many of our agencies, we're hearing that the flourishing new business conversations they were enjoying in the spring and even early summer have dried up. Their pipeline is dry. They are having a hard time getting a hold of anybody and having meaningful conversations. They're not writing proposals, they're not participating in pitches, and they are not winning new business. When you think about it, for our prospects, it is the dog days of summer. They have probably planned out the rest of the summer, and they have sort of put it on, set it, and forget it because they, too, are going on vacation and doing all the things that we like to do in the summer. So, most of them are not thinking right now about hiring an agency, and they probably won't be available until Labor Day unless they have a need. The problem is the way most agencies prospect; the way most agencies sort of hang up their shingle and announce that they are open for business is very random, right? We're out there. We hang up our shingle, we're knocking on doors, but we have no idea if the people that we're approaching have any interest in talking to us right now. Good news -- there's a better way. Watch »