Should you call me?
It will cost you nothing to find out. Our first conversation is free. It'll give us enough time to determine whether or not a longer engagement would help.
If necessary, I will come to your offices on a day rate basis plus expenses.
If we can do our work over the phone or online, I work on a per week fee for unlimited time (plus long distance charges).
In over 25 years of working with and observing the behavior and decision-making of agency CEOs, I've developed an "experiential database" of how management reacts and responds to the boom and bust nature of an agency's life cycle.
Contingency planning
Strategic planning for agencies is a fallacy and a waste of time. The real plannng that agencies MUST do is what I call contingency planning. What will you do if/when you lose your largest account? What will you do if a big one bites and you need to grow rapidly and smartly? What will you do when you're faced with any of the crises in our Crisis Catalog?
The decisions you make in these circumstances will make the difference between profit and loss, survival and disaster.
You need to be ready ahead of time.
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I Am . . .
Unlike a lot of people in the agency business, I always wanted to be in advertising. And I always wanted to have my own agency. So after graduating from college I headed straight to the Big Apple, working as a copywriter in several small shops. My goal was to learn the business from the ground up. I quickly became aware of the crisis-to-crisis nature of the business.
Eventually I ended up running the Hartford office of a New York / Boston / Hartford agency. Within a couple of years, I bought the office and built it from 7 to 32 employees. During that time the agency joined TAAN (Transworld Advertising Agency Network). We were members for 15 years, sharing ideas and observing how the other members handled the ups and downs of the business.
Upon selling out to a partner, the job of a lifetime opened up: the presidency of TAAN. For the next ten years I recruited new members, expanded the network globally, planned and ran over 40 meetings and workshops in the US and Europe, and worked with individual members on everything from new business to hiring and firing to organizational and management issues.
It was a great existence which exposed me to the inner workings of dozens of agencies and allowed me to become involved in their planning, decision making and reactions to the sudden changes that characterize our business. It's provided me with a vast experiential database that can help today's agency leaders understand and get through their crises, and emerge with positive, profitable outcomes. |
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