Is your agency stuck? Drew wants you to get moving!
Advice from Drew (McLellan of AMI Fame)
| I’ve been talking to agency owners from every edge of the globe. I’m doing this to find out what’s going on in their part of the world and how the pandemic is impacting their agency. Throughout the course of these conversations, I often end up asking about what their plan is for the next 30-60-90 days. I don’t typically get a concrete answer. Or I get a very scattered answer of 153 different tactics. But the most dangerous response I get is when an agency owner tells me that they’re busy, making money, and they really should but they’re afraid to take the action they believe they should take.
The unknown of this pandemic has many agencies and their leaders frozen in place. So instead of hiring, expanding, pivoting or whatever they know they should do — they’re paralyzed. I don’t want to go all science-y on you but it takes more force to get an object at rest to move than it does to keep a moving object in motion. That inertia is harder to overcome than it is to change directions once you’re already in motion. For many agencies, the financial aid that your government has provided has brought welcome relief. But I fear that it also brought you an excuse to hit the pause button. Under the guise of catching your breath, you’ve allowed the agency to slow down or maybe even stop moving. Take the moment that you need but do not let it stretch beyond a moment. For the last several weeks I’ve been imploring you to put together 5 mini-plans to keep your agency pushing forward. Any one of those plans will force you to remove any inertia that is threatening to set-in. The combination of them will force you to keep moving. Once you’re in motion, you can shift directions as needed because you’ll already have momentum on your side. In the next 30 days what is your agency doing to: • Make sure you deliver every project on-time and on-budget so you don’t whittle away your profit margins? • Get your team fired-up, better prepared/skilled, and focused on serving clients and delivering ROI every single day? • Secure your current clients and help them grab marketshare while their competitors are stuck in place? • Attract new clients who are hungry to take advantage of the opportunities that are found in every economic downturn? And most important of all — what are you, the agency owner or leader, doing in the next 30 days to create a vision of your agency’s future that you can share with excitement and confidence so that your entire team can rally behind you? Don’t let yourself get stuck. I’m not advocating you become reckless. But, I am advocating that you believe in yourself and the truth in front of you. For some of you that truth means you should be hiring right now. For others, it means you need to let someone go, regardless of your financial package. For yet others, it means becoming very focused and very motivated to go find the new clients who will appreciate and benefit from a partnership with you. Get moving — you can adjust the plan as you go. |
Tags: Advertising, agencies, associations, COVID-19, new business
