The official blog of Ignition Consulting Group
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-Company Leadership-
Grow or die. It's embedded in the capitalist psyche. But is there such a thing as "bad" growth? Or more to the point, "bad" profit? The answer is yes, and many companies -- including professional service firms -- are engaged in a short-sighted harvesting strategy that yields revenues in the current year but fails to plant the seed corn to produce profit pools in the years to come …
If you want the attention of an agency leader, manager, or department head, you’ll have to wait until they get a break in the action from the latest new business pitch. In agencies of all types and sizes, new business presentations are all-consuming. As a speculative investment, new business is always a gamble. But an even bigger problem is the misdirection and misallocation of agency talent spurred by the new business process …
By definition, “average” means the center of the bell curve — the place where most people and companies live. Average isn’t always a bad thing, such as average life expectancy. But in the realm of business strategy, average can be lethal. The interesting work in any field isn't happening in the middle, but at the edges …
While these unstable times make it infernally difficult to forecast your fiscal year revenue, there is a set of attributes and behaviors that can help foretell your firm’s long-term success. These are leading indicators, meaning they are predictive and diagnostic — the actions and attitudes that produce outsized financial and reputational capital for your firm …
Why do formerly successful agencies experience stall-out? It’s almost always because they are busy solving yesterday's problems instead of exploring today’s opportunities. In today’s agency environment, clients submit the equivalent of a work order and agencies dutifully respond. This cadence of activity generates income in the present, but it doesn’t lay the foundation future for revenue streams …
Are you unwittingly cultivating less committed professional relationships when you tell the people in your firm that you trust them, then put in place dozens of ways of auditing how they work and how they spend their time …
If your firm sells hours, how do your clients distinguish between paying for busy fools and eureka moments? Are they paying for middling plodders or proficient geniuses? Distracted muddlers or breakthrough brains? The billable hour, while arguably an easy thing to track, is not an easy thing to value …
Do you perform an annual assessment of your firm’s strengths and weaknesses? Most of the firms in this habit have a similar way of interpreting the results: breeze right past the strengths and instead focus laser-like on the weaknesses. In extreme cases, managers ignore the findings about strengths altogether and quite literally obsess about the weaknesses. This is precisely the wrong reaction …
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Exceptionally talented professional firms are distinguished not by what they do, but what they believe. Their work is unique because their beliefs are unique. They create dissimilar solutions because they have a dissimilar mindset. In a business context, our paradigm about the business we’re in is the mental map that guides our daily decisions. So having the right paradigm — an accurate map — is essential to effectiveness. No amount of “hard work” will compensate for a faulty field guide …
Strengths contribute everything; weaknesses contribute nothing. When we spend all of our energies trying to fix problems, there's no time or energy left over to capitalize on opportunities, which is the real basis of your firm's success …
What exactly constitutes success in context of a professional services business like an advertising agency? Should success be defined exclusively in financial terms? Is it more about reputation and recognition? This topic actually produces some heated debates in the hallways of agencies across the globe. Creatives insist that being recognized for brilliant work is by far the most important metric of success. Account types counter that while awards are good and desirable, they don’t pay the bills. Both arguments are right, of course, but determining a winner requires viewing the question through a different lens …
Has your billable time ever been scrutinized? If you work for an advertising agency or other type of professional services firm, chances are you have been subject to a battery of billable time evaluations, all designed to achieve one thing in the mind of the agency owner: maximize productivity …
I once heard the ECD of one of America’s most respected agencies say, “If you get the structure right, everything else will take care of itself.” The more I think about it, the more I think he’s right.
Developing a relevant, differentiating positioning strategy is hard enough. But it’s harder still to bring your positioning to life throughout all the various dimensions and business practices of the agency. Here are 25 questions that will help you assess how well you’re doing …
Why is there so much rework on a lot of agency projects? Because most agencies are so submerged with “rush” work (now the rule instead of the exception) that most assignments are initiated with incomplete information, no brief, no briefing – only a job number and a due date …
