How do agencies “do” strategy

Hey, everybody. Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute this week coming to you from Savannah, Georgia. So we spent the last couple of days with one of our peer groups and one of the more interesting conversations we had was around the idea of strategy and being strategic, being a strategic thinker. Is that innate or is it something that can be learned and taught? And the reality is where we landed was the answer is both. That there are absolutely some people, and odds are most of you, if you own or are a leader in an agency, odds are you are innately strategic. You just naturally know kind of where to lean in, what questions to ask. You have a curiosity about business and your clients that makes you a very strategic thinker. Oftentimes, it also makes you the bottleneck inside your agency because you're the only strategic thinker. And many agency owners will tell us how frustrated they are that they can't get the rest of their team, whether it's account service folks or it's subject matter experts, or it's your creatives, to think strategically as you would like them to.

So that gets us to the other side of the equation is all right, so can strategy be taught? So one of the interesting things Danyel said in the meeting today is that we often think of strategy as a noun, a deliverable, and we don't think about it as a verb, that we can be strategic. And that strategy is something that we do as opposed to something we hand a client on a piece of paper or in a document. And that led us to a conversation around: all right, so if you have people on your team who are not agency owners or leaders, and maybe they're not innately strategic or innately curious, how can they learn to be more strategic? And we talked about things like, do we have systems and processes in place, for example, do the account people have on their agenda –their status meeting agenda with their clients – three questions that they should ask the client to learn more about the business? Is there structure inside your agency for regularly getting together to look at the data and what you know about the client and the industry –to have strategic insights and that kind of that group thinking around strategy? Do we have moments with clients where they're counting on us to come to them with strategies so that we take the time to be strategic?

So for some of you, it just happens. In every meeting you're strategic. And for others, we've got to bake in opportunities to do strategy – the verb – to get to strategy the noun. And what we also know is that part of being strategic is continually learning more about the client's industry and the client's business. So how do we do that? And by the way, that can't all be done only if the client is willing to pay for it. The reality is, one of the things we hear year after year in our research is one of the reasons we get fired by clients is because we don't bring them enough ideas. We don't bring them new insights. We don't bring them the noun version of strategy. One of the ways to make them feel like we are always bringing them strategy is by having strategic conversations in our regular interactions. Which means that we have to bake that into agendas and plans, and we have to be willing to invest some of our time on our dime to create these strategic ideas on behalf of clients. So if you're having that internal battle or if you have that frustration inside your shop, and maybe you're the bottleneck or someone else in your agency is the bottleneck, remember that there are two kinds of people in our agency. One, the people who are just naturally strategic. Yay for them! And boy, is it great when we have more than one of those on the team. And two, the people that need some system and process around them to be more strategic. So either way we can get better at this, it's just a matter of which path we have to take.

All right? See you next week.