“We’re growing so fast; everyone is just trying to keep up!” The excitement of rapid agency growth makes it fun to say, “It’s a good problem to have.” Good for now. Problematic later. Let’s get you ready for what comes next. Rapid growth often looks like this: Staff begin wearing many hats Process is ignored […]
Why Project Debriefs Are Too Little Too Late
“We only debrief on a project if something went wrong on the project or with a client.” Wouldn’t it be better to prevent this? Here’s an easy way that every agency should use… If you run a debrief at the end of a project, it’s already too late to change the outcome. And any learning […]
How to Eliminate Waste in Agencies
Let’s eliminate all the ways your agency is wasting away its margins. Once you know what to look for, you’ll see this everywhere. “Waste” is anything in your agency’s processes that prevents or slows down the delivery of value to your clients. It costs you time, weakens client relationships, and frustrates employees. A few common […]
Throw Out Your Job Descriptions
For greater accountability in your agency, throw out your job descriptions. The average job description is prescriptive and emphasizes activities over outcomes. When we prescribe specific activities to a role, we set an expectation for our people to keep to those activities. This can restrict their sense of freedom to evolve how they work, which […]
Why Your Agency Creatives Hate Your Deadlines
Some agencies tell me they have an accountability problem– that creatives don’t complete their work by the deadline a PM assigned. What these agencies are really describing is … … a management-style problem. The example I see most often is when traffic or project managers instruct creatives on what to work on down to the […]
4 Causes of Bad Meetings, and How to Fix Them
“Too many meetings! No time to get any actual work done.” I hear this from agency staff quite often. This typically points back to 4 causes… 1. Project-based team assignments. When you assign people to projects, each project will have its own series of duplicative meetings. If you instead assign projects to cross-functional fixed teams, […]
