Count your lucky stars if your agency is not part of a publicly held company endlessly analyzed by Wall Street.

Have you been following the bad news about Interpublic? There's a lesson in it for smaller independent agencies.

Stuart Elliott in The New York Times recently wrote a piece about the Interpublic mess that inadvertently points out the crux of the problem because of what he didn't say. The entire article never mentions (1) the work or (2) clients, focusing only on Wall Street's dim view of IPG's money-making ability.

Yes, I know it's publicly traded and the owners expect their investment to be profitable, but doesn't anybody still believe keeping clients happy is where making money begins?

The key to agency profitability is delivering exceptional solutions that meet client marketing challenges. Simply put: Keep your clients happy with advertising that works. If you continually execute the basics of proactive client/agency relationship-building you'll be in good shape. Here are the essentials:

• Conduct confidential internal account reviews every 90 days; create a culture of continuous improvement
• Install a rigorous objective method to discover client expectations. Don't rely on your own people to tell you how well they know their client's needs - it's an obvious conflict of interests
• Hire and keep only the best people. If mediocre performers are acceptable to you then get used to mediocre financial performance
• Build a motivation and reward process that's designed to work with the kind of personalities our business attracts
• Make everyone responsible for generating and delivering useful proactive ideas to clients. Clients tell us the primary reason they hammer down rates or seek another shop is that the agency does nothing more than order-taking, and even that not always well
• Anytime you make a decision about spending money, ask "Will this help us do a more effective job for our clients?" If the answer is no, you're off course

Maybe too many green eyeshades are impairing the vision of the lumbering conglomerate dinosaurs.

Smaller more agile agencies can still be advertising agencies, focused on satisfying the real analysts: their clients.

The obvious difference is that at the drive-up you get pretty much the same thing every time - you know what to expect. But with the brochure you're creating something completely new from scratch.

Yet there's a bigger, more significant difference that has to do with the very essence of the agency/client bond. You probably don't have much of a 'relationship' with the fast food store, which when you think about it is little more than a big vending machine with its own parking lot. They sell food, you pay for it, you drive off.

The client and agency, on the other hand, come together to form an entirely new entity. . . to create things to meet certain specific objectives of the client's strategic communications plan. Now this is important: This entity is not just two separate parties, a buyer and a vendor, doing business. It's much more dynamic than that; it's a complex ongoing relationship.

What's really happening is, even if they don't realize it, the agency and the client are creating a distinct working relationship that exists as something apart and distinct from both parties. And it's that relationship that gets the work done.

Here's another way to think about it. There's an ancient Sufi teaching that says: "You think that because you understand one that you also understand two, because one and one makes two. But you must also understand and."

When you think of it like that, there's no room when talking about clients and agencies for the word "vendor." A vendor is someone who sells. Sure, agencies sell what they create but they don't exist just to sell things; they exist to create with the client things that communicate.

• How does your agency office layout compare to others? What does it say about your business philosophy?
• What's appropriate when using e-mail with a client? What should you NEVER do in a business e-mail?

Those and other topics are covered in the Spring issue of Grant's Report being delivered this week to subscribers. It's mailed free quarterly to anyone requesting it. If you'd like to receive it, just send a note to joe@joegrantconsulting.com
.