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What’s the biggest mistake agency owners make?
There are many challenges that come with some pretty big consequences when you own an agency. But the greatest consequence is when the agency owner does not build wealth outside the agency while they still own it. Watch »
Grow what you have
Many agencies have new business meetings, and what that usually means is that you are bringing a task force or a small subset of your team together, and you're talking about what's in the pipeline, prospects, what you're doing to attract new clients to the agency, to have an opportunity to sell to them. But very few agencies have a sales meeting focused on existing clients. Watch »
Time To Be Clear
One of the areas where I think most agency leaders and owners can improve is the clarity of communication that we have with our team members. I'm challenging you to work on improving the clarity of your conversations. Start having smaller conversations with team members, less intense conversations, things that aren't of critical importance. Practice having candor and clear communications, so that on the day when you have to have the big conversation about something that really matters. Watch »
Your agency’s work environment
Back in the day when we were all in an office together, one of my favorite things was to walk into someone's office and observe what they chose to surround themselves with. Things they collected, pictures of family and friends, swag from the agency, work that they were really proud of, but it was really cool to see what they chose to create their work environment with, the tools that they surrounded themselves, the environment that they created. Now that so many people are working from home at least part of the week, if not all of the week, or even if you're in an office, you may have a situation where people are fluid in and out of offices and so they don't have their own workspace. It got me thinking about how we probably have not taken the time to create that same kind of environment in our work offices. And we really haven't, as agency owners, supported our team in creating that sort of work environment. Now, I know most of you have provided computers and monitors and are helping pay for internet and all of the sort of the basics, but have you thought at all about what surrounds your employees and what inspires them to do great work? Watch »
AI experiments for your agency
Every agency on the planet is talking about AI these days, and here are a couple ways that you and your agency can experiment with, start using, and start talking about AI. Watch »
Share your goals with your team
As agency owners and leaders, we have goals and we don't share them with the people around us. We don't share them with our leadership team. We don't share them with the agency as a whole, and when we don't share them, our team, our leadership team, and our employees can't participate in accomplishing the goal or celebrating the goal. I think all too often we hold that stuff so close to the vest that we lose the opportunity, one, to collaborate, and two, to celebrate. We need to be better about that in our agencies too, we need to talk about our goals, we need to talk about why they matter, and we need to have other people contribute to accomplishing the goals. Remember, we learn better when we learn together. We accomplished things better when we accomplished them together. Watch »
Summer Learning
Here's my challenge for you. My challenge for you is to read one new business book, read one new fiction book that's just interesting to you, whether it's a murder mystery or a cookbook, or something that just is something that piques a passion of yours. And then find a new podcast and find and try a new AI tool. So those four things: read a business book, read a book for pleasure, find a new podcast that you can enjoy throughout the summer, and find a new AI tool that you can experiment with and you can take back and teach your team. So let's have our own summer enrichment program this summer and see how much smarter we can be by Labor Day. Watch »
What is fear doing to your agency
I think there are two things that help push past fear. Number one, we have to be really clear about why we're doing it and we have to have a deep desire to do whatever the thing is that we're afraid to do. So we have to be motivated in some way. And it can't be scarcity-based, it can't be fear-based. It really has to be something bigger and better than that. And number two, we have to find a way to push past the initial fear. So for some of you, it's an accountability buddy. For some of you, it is making a commitment to a business coach or a business partner. For others of you, it may be a significant milestone: the 25th anniversary of your business, your 50th birthday, whatever it may be. But when we are really clear about why we want to do it and we have motivation behind that is abundance-based and opportunity or experience-based and we hold ourselves accountable either by ourselves or oftentimes with a partner of some kind, somebody we're going to do something with or somebody we've made a commitment to do something, all of a sudden, then we can push past that fear. Watch »
Details show we care
Sometimes we are in such a hurry to get the work done. And especially today, because everything is so computerized, we're not sitting down with clients anymore to present work. We're just emailing it over to them. We've lost the art of sort of beautifying our world and our work. And I think there's a lost art to making something tantalizing to look at or to open or to feel like somebody went a little extra just because just for the effort of making something beautiful. As you think about how you present your work to clients, how you mail things to clients, how you show up, even how you do it for your employees, it's not just for our clients, but are there ways that you can really kind of beautify your work and the way you present yourself, the way you present the agency? Can you find little moments where you can create something special that makes someone feel like they were important enough to you for you to go that little extra mile? Watch »
Don’t count your chickens too early
Whether you prebill for media or you bill half upfront on a job for services or strategy, no matter what when you bill a client and it's prebilled, meaning you're billing it before the work is done. That should not show up on your P&L at all. That is not income to you. It's actually a liability and should show up on your balance sheet. And here's why? If the client changes their mind and asks for the money back, you haven't earned that money yet. You have to give them back their money. And so that's why, number one, all agencies need to work on an accrual basis. And number two, how you book that income and when it's income is very important in terms of tracking your AGI, your growth, your revenue, etc. Let's say you prebill a client for $100,000 of a media spend, and 15% of that is going to be commissioned to you. All $100,000 should be booked as a liability. So you want to show that it came into the company. But it sits on your books as a liability until you actually do the work or place the media buy, until you spend the money in one way or another, then you bring it over to your P&L. 15% becomes income and the rest becomes a cost of goods expense and an equal amount of income on the client's invoice side. Watch »
