Win Without Pitching®: Thinking

Agency Business

Should Your Firm Launch a Venture Fund?

If you have the appetite for it, consider investing in a venture unit where one success has the potential to generate the equivalent of years of profit.

Getting Paid

There are three keys to getting paid: start with new standards for new clients, summon the resolve to enforce your new standards the moment client behavior starts to slip, and be willing to walk away from clients that don’t honor their commitments.

In 2020 You Were Spectacular

What a year. Our Win Without Pitching annual planning meeting is tomorrow and I can’t help but think back to the plans we made a year ago for 2020. The phrase “We plan, God laughs” comes to mind. Who planned for this? Putting aside the human tragedy of more than 70 million infected, 1.5 million

You Don’t Really Partner With Your Clients

Many agencies like to boast on their websites and in their pitch decks that they “partner” with their clients. It’s bullshit of course. What they mean is they aspire to have their clients treat them like partners instead of vendors. I get it. It’s good to have a goal. But putting it on the website

Four Regrets You’re About to Have

Postmortems are great tools for steady improvement. At the end of any project or new initiative you simply revisit the objective and discuss what went well and what you would do differently next time. A similar idea is the premortem. Project yourself into the future, past the project you are about to undertake, and imagine

Play the Game of Constraints

I’ve been using constraint-driven exercises for years to think creatively about my own business and to help our clients free themselves from the mental models in which many have become trapped. Try these six constraint-driven exercises.

Is It Ethical to Sell in These Times?

We in the creative professions often recoil from the function of selling because we are scarred by the bad buying experiences involving the first salesperson who, for reasons of ideology, training or incentives, saw selling as the requirement to convince.

Collecting, Communicating and Closing in a Time of Crisis

In last week’s post Three Steps to Surviving and Thriving in a Crisis I said step one is to survive the crisis and economic gridlock that will be with us for a few weeks. In part one of two in my survival series, I’ll share some specifics of how you can shore up revenue now.

Recurring Revenue: Holy Grail or False Promise?

I see many agency principals pursuing recurring revenue as though it is the answer to all of their problems. I’m not going to say that recurring revenue models are bad or wrong—they are neither—but like everything in life they come with tradeoffs, and I think most marketing firms pursuing these models are unaware of the tradeoffs until they are deep into business model changes.

Three Steps to Surviving and Thriving in a Crisis

I’ve lived through two previous recessions as an entrepreneur and what we are experiencing right now is not a recession — it is an economic crisis. The recession is what comes next after things stabilize.

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