You owe you

So why even consider breaking out? Unless you know the answer, there’s no point, because your end in mind is always the biggest issue. Without a big enough “why,” nothing happens.

Whom do you “owe?” You owe you!  And because you’re the only one who is ultimately responsible for your success or failure, you owe it to yourself to be the best.

Author and minister Eric Thomas, known as the hip-hop preacher, travels the globe spreading that message and motivating people to live up to their fullest potential. He definitely knows a thing or two about breaking out and holding oneself accountable.

Thomas grew up poor in Detroit, dropped out of high school, and lived on the streets for two years. Ultimately he decided to turn his life around, earning a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from Michigan State University. In addition to being a motivational speaker and YouTube sensation, he founded a company that offers education...

Are you stuck in a rut?

Sometimes when I talk to agency owners or producers who are caught in a rut, the image of an amorphous blob springs to mind. I realize that may sound strange, but when they describe not knowing what to do or how to climb out of their rut, I often envision the weird clumps of matter I frequently see floating in the Gulf of Mexico. I really don’t know what those floating masses are or what their purpose is in the ecosystem; they just seem to bob along with the current.

Obviously people are not blobs—or at least they don’t have to be—yet many agency owners and producers find that it’s much easier to float along with the current than to change direction. Even if they wanted to, most of them wouldn’t know where to start. Furthermore, most of them do quite well for themselves, even if they’ve never had an actual business plan that they follow. Accordingly, there may be no real incentive for them to break out of their rut...

There’s an old saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” While I won’t argue with that, I think an even better saying might be, “If it is broke, fix it!” In this article, I want to challenge your thinking about what it means for an agency to be “broken” and what it costs you if that agency happens to be yours.

Is your agency broken? If you are not achieving the results you know you should and could achieve, something is broken. Here are just a few things that are usually broken in the average agency and that must be fixed if the agency expects to create better results.

Low organic growth.

If your net new revenues (excluding acquisitions) are less than 15%, that needs to be fixed. With the latest soft market hitting us, plus ever-increasing competition and commoditization of the products you sell, it’s time to become a selling machine.

As I’ve mentioned several times in past columns, the usual response is,...