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1. Remember the overwhelming value of efficiency in your agency. With all markups on outside purchases on decline, or at least seriously renegotiated by clients, the only sustainable resource is the billing of hours or fees to clients. The world of successful agencies now belongs to those who can bill more time to clients in the same 24-hour period. This means no slippage of hours and no hours that are thrown away at the end of a project. Watching this in your agency could in fact increase your billable hours by up to 25% (a figure we have got from one of our clients FST Marketing – do let us know if you would like their case study).

2. Build an estimate of time and a timeline for every project. This way you will have some sense of what you are aiming for with regards to estimate vs. actual and can keep the hours and overall job and stage profitability at your fingertips.  Also it’s easier to see the order and delivery of stages rather than the overall deadline.

3. Make sure the client sees and agrees with the time estimate and the overall timeline. If they consistently blow their part of the timeline, or they make changes which affect your time on the project, then you need to alert them by charging for that time or charging overtime to complete the work. Put terms on your estimates stating that “the client understands the submitted timeline and hours to complete the project and agrees that they must conform to the dates; and if they make changes they will be charged.” If you give the client a timeline on the project and you tell them they may incur extra charges if they don’t comply with their portion of the timeline, you will see your scheduling pain ease by 30%. Clients can cause up to 30% or more of scheduling issues in agencies.

4. Publish a daily “hot list.” This allows everyone in the agency to have a sense of what’s going on. Make sure everyone reads and reviews this every day. This is a major tool for the account team who need their projects completed, and for the creative teams who need a sense of structure.

5. Appoint one person to be in charge of studio management. In most agencies, studio management and good workflow are so important to profitability that it pays to hire a person to fill this position. Try not to assign that person to other jobs within the agency. Studio management is important enough in a busy agency to keep someone going full-time. If the studio manager is active, they will track every job, every day, every step of the way and will pay for themselves quickly.

6. Make sure no one “side tracks” the studio manager. If the project or account handlers, creatives or owners bring work back to the agency, or want changes to work already in the studio – but neglect to run this by the studio manager – all previous scheduling will be shot. The truth is no traffic and daily workflow system will function, regardless how carefully planned or how heavily computerised, unless everyone wants it to work, from the owner or boss down to the junior designer.  Almost any system will work if the team wants it to work.

Thought for the Month

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can … begin it.  Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”  Goethe

All the best,

Tracey

Is it possible to thrive in recession? Yes, of course it is. But we are often too busy focusing on the doom and gloom of companies going under that we forget that there are always a few “lucky” ones that do really well. The truth, of course, is that these companies are not successful due to luck. Instead, you will find that they have a robust strategy in place to make sure they get out on top.

Put in place a few simple strategies and achieve great things while your competitors suffer.

Here are our top tips to surviving and thriving a recession: posted by James Holman

Income streams. There are a few things to think about here. First, make sure you have a clear understanding of where your income is coming from. Second, develop additional income streams by adding services and/or products to your offering. Thirdly, you should look at the way you charge your clients. Is there a way to develop continuity income?

Visibility. It is more important than ever that you do not reduce your marketing efforts and lose visibility. This is one of the key aspects of doing well during a recession. Many visibility channels are actually free or low cost, so don’t use cost as an excuse to not take action. Plan long term and make sure you make your visibility strategy a priority.

Tracking. Keep track of which marketing activities bring you the most business. Increase activities that work and reduce or eliminate those who don’t.

Think Freelancers. Freelancers are an affordable way to ensure you have resources to complete jobs and keep your service level up.

Automate your business. Find ways or tools to automate tasks and processes. This will reduce the workload for you and your staff. Is there something you have been doing manually that a system could do?

These tips are useful in good times as well as bad times. However, in a difficult economic climate the urgency for a plan increases. Make sure you put a plan in place today and see your business thrive.

1. Make sure your agency has someone acting as a workflow facilitator. This person is usually the traffic manager, but it can be someone (or several people) other than the traffic manager. Agency workflow account coordinators, studio managers and/or production managers come to mind. You cannot run any kind of productive agency with 100 or more jobs and no work flow management.

2. Commit to a grid system of critical path management. This means that you run your agency just like they do in manufacturing. Devise a grid form where all agency jobs are listed vertically down one side of the grid and all the step-by-step functions run horizontally across the top. The traffic manager charts the course of each project by developing a critical path, then follows each job’s critical path so that the projects can be completed on time. It is a good idea to computerise this grid-making and tracking process. It is critical for your agency to be as efficient as possible because billing time and fee revenue is paramount.

3. Manage the grid closely each day. Insist that no-one go around the traffic and production managers. All requests should go through traffic and production, or at least demand that people inform traffic about every issue.

4. The traffic manager publishes the daily recap, or “hot” sheet. By doing this daily, it is far more likely that the agency will be dealing with the latest information about any project, job, campaign or change. We’ve seen agencies where the daily sheet has been taken a step further and become a daily agency communications device in addition to being a schedule. One agency even puts “who’s in/who’s out,” “who’s coming to the agency to visit,” when all meetings are, etc. and the latest recipes and agency news / gossip. All in all, the daily recap is a very useful document.