Suppose you were in the nursery business. You’d want to produce
flat after flat of pretty, healthy plants all about the same size
and color. You’d water them the same, fertilize them evenly,
and make sure they got consistent sunlight. Your uniform approach
would yield predictable and we’ll assume profitable results.
Now let’s imagine you’re in the race horse business.
You’d buy and breed only a few horses with outstanding potential,
hoping to find that exceptional one that would be a big winner.
If you were lucky enough to develop an extraordinary animal you’d
pour your resources into it. You’d hire top notch trainers,
sign up a world-class jockey, provide the very best veterinary care
and so on. You’d invest and re-invest in your highly talented
find so it would yield outstanding returns.
I think the agency business is more like breeding race horses
than growing flowers…but all too often we treat our thoroughbred
account ponies like petunias.
We try to make clients fit into systems and procedures convenient
for us. We make them adjust to our estimating and invoicing systems
and balk when they request more information or want it in a different
form. We expect clients to meet our scheduling priorities…and
our creative idiosyncrasies.
Leo (of the agency bearing that name) understood the racehorse
idea. There was a time when Burnett strategically chose to house
no more than 11 great accounts, each handled befitting the unique
bloodline they represented.
During those years they never tried to put the same saddle on different
steeds.
We can learn from this, even in small agencies. Critical to your
success is engaging people ideally suited to sensing the nuances
of individual client needs, functioning like an intuitive equine
trainer. With the right kind of handling accounts will grow strong
at your agency generating dependable and expanding profits year
after year. Managing each like the one-of-a-kind entity it is will
yield much better results than sprinkling handfuls of Rapid-Gro
across your roster.
Are you willing to let your account folks run the business…and
not allow operations-types to ride roughshod over them?
Accounting, traffic, and others with a proclivity for homogeneity
need to understand that making a god of uniformity could well prevent
the agency from making a run for the roses.
So are you like the gardener managing for normalcy, carefully applying
identical amounts of water and fertilizer to each row of flowers
for uniform results? Or like the horse whisperer – intuiting
subtleties to seamlessly deliver both what your individual client
wants and simultaneously giving them what they need.
You gotta decide what kind of business you’re in.
