How to get the most out of your agency relationships: share your business focus and challenges
This article is written for someone working on the clients side, looking to improve collaboration or want to know what you should expect. But also useful for anyone working on the agency side, to make sure you can ask your client the right questions and to help for the relationship. This article is written from a fullservice perspective - i.e from an agency providing insight work, to building websites to managing your marketing investments. I've tried to make this as generic as possible and from a collaborative viewpoint. Part one focuses on setting the foundation - when you start a new collaboration - a few points that I think is useful to have in mind in this particular phase of a new budding client-agency relationship.
Basic creative agency economy
Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.- Andy Warhol My first article in the series of agency life will focus on three economy terms you need to get familiar with. (there are more, however these four are the most important to get familiar and comfortable with to get the basis of agency business acumen in place) And also a framework for calculating a monthly target for your Account Directors (or Project Managers, department managers or whatever is applivcable to yourcompany). When you run a creative agency and work with creativity, either it be data, design, marketing or technology related. I.e offer a service of some sort generated by delivering it as a result from intellectual work and emotional labour, you need your foundation in place for understanding the incoming value of your work as well as indicators of success or warning signs in client relationships, way or working/teams and accounts. If you work a lot of hours you should get a lot of value generated back from that, otherwise you need to understand why this is and be able to change something. In this article I cover: Billability Burn rate Baseline How to calculate a monthly target for your department or team of Account Directors
How to make a clear and visual time plan
Every project plan need a clear, visual time plan. This helps both you, the team and client to better understand the project and helps everyone feel more in control since it makes it visually clear on what needs to be
How to create a kick-ass project plan in 7 easy steps
Planning is half the job done and if you have a project proposal which is approved by the client, it's even easier. Just re-use the information from your proposal, and use what is relevant for your team based on the 7 points below. If you start from scratch, these are the bare minimum of information required to use as a clear and helpful steering document while working with your project.