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.

Now that I’ve had a year of studying it from afar, I have some thoughts on best practices around this growing trend. It is not without its pitfalls, if you make some wrong turns.

• This is a premium product — having your AE on-site in their environment — so price it accordingly.
• Think long and hard about who you choose to embed. It’s easy for them to begin to feel more like your client’s employee than the agency’s employee. You want someone who is very committed to your agency’s success.
• Do not allow them to work onsite at the client’s office more than 3.5 days a week. You need them to spend time back at the agency, staying connected to the team and being reminded where they actually work.
• Have a very well-written non-compete and non-solicitation clause in your contract with the client so they cannot “woo” your employee away.
• Have a very well-written non-solicitation, no stealing clients clause in your contract with the employee so they can’t branch out on their own or offer themselves to another agency with the promise of delivering your client in the deal.

There is a lot of upside to this idea but be mindful of the risks and protect yourself accordingly. In 2018, I saw a handful of these arrangements. In 2019 — it went up significantly. I am seeing agencies of all sizes, in both the B2C and B2B space, offering this to clients. It’s not going away anytime soon so you should probably decide how you feel about it and if it might make sense for your shop!