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Tax planning for 2025
April 15th has just gone by. And for many of us, that is a day we remember that date in infamy. It's the day we must write the check to the IRS, at least here in the United States. Today is the day tax planning for 2025 must start if it hasn't already. What I mean by that is I want you to get with your tax preparer or your tax strategist—and I hope you have a tax strategist—and say, based on my ‘24 taxes, what could I or should I have done last year that would have reduced my tax burden this year? Watch »
How do agencies “do” strategy
Is being good at strategy innate, or is it something that can be learned? The reality is that where we landed was the answer is both. There are absolutely some people, and odds are most of you if you own or are a leader in an agency, who are innately strategic. You just naturally know where to lean in and what questions to ask. You are curious about business and your clients, making you a very strategic thinker. Often, this also makes you the bottleneck inside your agency because you're the only strategic thinker. 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, subject matter experts, or creatives, to think as strategically as you would like them to. So that gets us to the other side of the equation: can strategy be taught? Watch »
Do what you can
I think we are in a season of making due, with the tariff, the stock market, and all the other things sort of reacting around us. Our job is to stay calm and make do. New business is not coming in as fast right now, and clients are not spending as freely right now. We have to just know that this is a season for us to weather and weather together. So lean in, take advantage of resources. Come to our Q&A every month. Let's talk together about this. We're going to be trying to provide as much guidance as we can through the newsletter, through the Build a Better Agency Summit, through all of those things. But it is a time for us to be wise about what we're doing, doing more with less and doing that for ourselves, our agency, and our clients. I want you to think about how you kind of batten down the hatches for your clients? How do you help your clients weather this. The agencies that help their clients weather economic uncertainty, just like we did in covid, those are the agencies that when we come out of this – because we always do – when we come out of this, those are the agencies that are going to be rewarded for showing up as a great business partner, a great business strategist, a great thinker who helps our clients do the right thing even in tough times. And so I want to encourage you to look for ways to do a little more for your clients right now. Watch »
It’s time to be bold
At this moment, there's a lot of pause, and there's a lot of fear that has caused everybody to freeze. What we're hearing from agencies all across the world, but particularly here in the United States, is that the pipeline has just dried up, that clients and prospects don't want to talk about more budget or a new budget. They're frozen in place as they wait for things to settle down, for the tariff talks to change, for some certainty to come into this great uncertainty. We're also seeing that same behavior showing up in agencies and agency owners that you, too, have paused. You're not initiating big new programs. You are not creating new things for prospects, clients, and team members. I want to challenge you in this: right now, while the world is watching and waiting, we don't have to watch and wait. We have all this control over our own business. We can't control what the economy is doing, our worldview, or what's happening politically, but we can control how we show up in our own businesses. Watch »
Knowledge Sharing
One of the conversations we're having with many agency owners these days is how to take the knowledge that one person or one department has inside the agency and infuse it through the entire organization. Knowledge sharing around clients, around the industries you serve, is becoming more and more critical as we look to grow our existing client base, as we look to serve our clients better, to be more valuable to them, to increase their spending with us year over year, it requires us to have a depth of knowledge around their specific business, around the industry they serve, around the work we do, and of course, the work that we do on their behalf, the marketing work. But in many cases, that information is siloed inside of the account service department or some of your production people. Or it might even be siloed with you, the agency owner or an agency leader. We have to build infrastructure inside our agencies for internal education programs. One of the things I want you to think about for 2025 is how to ensure that knowledge is not isolated in a person or department. Watch »
Bonus Criteria
As agency owners, we make a couple critical mistakes when it comes to giving bonuses. The first one is that we just give out money in the fourth quarter because we have money left over. And so we “reward” people. But we haven't done anything to change their behavior throughout the year, to get them to earn that money and to understand how they can help the agency have even more money at the end of the year. And number two, we structure bonus programs based on longevity rather than tying it to KPIs that are something that everyone in your organization can achieve. Watch »
Time to Raise Prices
Many of you are realizing that your expenses have been rising for the last several years. The one thing that hasn't changed is how you price. Several folks are asking how I can have this conversation with clients and how I can have this conversation with prospects. The good news is that with prospects, the conversation is pretty straightforward. This is what we charge. Most of you don't actually talk about an hourly rate with your clients. 99% of you are project-based, which means clients want a thing or a series of things, and you're going to give them a flat fee for the delivery of those things. So it might be strategy, monthly PPC or SEO campaign, or something else, but you're not really unraveling for them your hourly rate. You're just saying you want these deliverables. And here's the price. So for prospects, it's pretty easy. You need to start calculating your prices based on a minimum of $175 an hour. Here's how you have that conversation with your clients. Watch »
Growing our clients
It can be a struggle to help your account service team understand that it's their job to grow their book of business by 10%, to grow the clients they already serve. And that part of the problem is they don't know how. And it starts with them not understanding a) it’s their role. But then they have no infrastructure or way to measure or a way to help each other or a roadmap of how to grow their existing clients. A lot of AEs will say, well, this is their budget, and I'm not a salesperson. It's not actually about being a salesperson, as you know. Watch »
What’s missing from your job descriptions?
We're working on a set of job description templates for members. One of the things that we're realizing is that one of the elements that most job descriptions are missing, which I think is actually one of the most critical elements of a job description, is KPIs. Measurable, attainable, objective ways for you and your employees to measure their performance. It shouldn't be a huge, long list. It doesn't need to be 10 or 15 KPIs, but 5 to 6 KPIs that are very specific to their job that will be a way for you and them to keep score. One of the things we know about today's employees is that they're very anxious to sort of have a checklist of what doing a good job means. What it looks like and your job description is your first opportunity to give them that sort of template or checklist of how to show up as a great AE or a great copywriter or whatever their role is. But 95% of the job descriptions we see coming from all of you don't have specific KPIs. It may have vague language around listing their responsibilities, but it doesn't say how you will measure their performance. And for you and the employee, one of the realizations is that today's employees want specifics, and then they will work very hard to hit those specifics. Watch »
Continual Improvement
For most of us, one of our goals is to keep our employees for a long time. When we have a great team member, we want them to stick around. There are significant economic and emotional and sort of systemic reasons why we wish long-term employees. But what we also want from our long-term employees is that they keep getting better. We work in an industry where if we don't keep learning and we don't keep improving, we very quickly can become obsolete. So one of the things you need to do inside your agency is build in the reinforcement that no matter how good you are today, you need to keep getting better. And the best way to do that is in your one-on-one meetings with every single employee. We shouldn't be rewarding employees for longevity. We should be rewarding employees for the contributions they make to the agency. And part of the contribution we need every single team member to make is that they keep getting better. So you need to build in systems and process inside your organization to not only encourage improvement, but to reward improvement. So don't leave it to chance. Build a program into your agency so that every employee keeps getting better and better over time. Watch »
