Devoted to liberating agencies and other professional firms from the tyranny of an outdated revenue model and an unfocused business strategy.

USA
Joined August 2009
Agencies, it’s time to stop remodeling the house and move to a better neighborhood — a community where firms are paid for their heads instead of their hands. More here: bit.ly/3zFWF4g
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Agencies devote too much effort to building the best house in a bad neighborhood. Maybe it’s time to move, not just remodel. More here: bit.ly/3zFWF4g
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Agency leadership often announces a “restructuring” that results in a new website featuring yet more offerings tacked onto an already overly ambitious service set. But instead of just remodeling the house, how about moving to a better neighborhood? bit.ly/3zFWF4g
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The point of progressive pricing strategies isn’t to charge more; it’s to charge differently. bit.ly/3XNtpSn
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“Value-based” is a suboptimal way to describe a new approach to pricing because it sounds too subjective. Better to use the term “solution-based.” What we’re really referring to is pricing based on the value to the customer — as in customer-based pricing. bit.ly/3XNtpSn
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State-of-the-art pricing starts with WTP: Willingness to Pay. The answer to that question defines the price. bit.ly/3XNtpSn
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If you’re in the process of exploring new revenue models, be careful not to confuse “value-based” with “performance-based.” While outcome-based pricing is a form of value-led pricing, it’s not how new pricing strategies should be defined. bit.ly/3XNtpSn
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The biggest obstacle to developing an effective positioning strategy for your firm comes not from outside market forces, but rather from inside your head.
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Agencies generally have low multiples in the M&A world because it’s so easy to enter and exit the agency business. But a productized business model changes all that, creating inimitable assets that create exponential value. bit.ly/3T7AMkL
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Because they are tethered to the hourly rate, agencies as businesses lack the ability to scale; increasing revenue means increasing staff—a form of anti-scaling. bit.ly/3T7AMkL
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A productized business model requires agencies to come to grips with the fact that their promise of “full-service, full-funnel, or end-to-end” offerings is untenable and unrealistic. bit.ly/3T7AMkL
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The problem with most business strategies is that they claim too much and sacrifice too little.
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No firm that plays on a national stage can claim to be a monolithic stand-alone resource for its clients. Rather, the best professional service firms are part of an increasingly complex and interdependent ecosystem of specialized solutions providers. bit.ly/4fA04RZ
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"Why Time-Based Billing Doesn’t Work for Agencies," Ignition's Tim Williams' recent interview with Jenny Plant on The Creative Agency Account Manager Podcast bit.ly/3S5rN2P
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The real resistance to revenue model transformation isn’t external; it comes from the inside. The resistance is cultural, rooted in an outdated view of what the agency business is supposed to be like. bit.ly/3UcJ6zi
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All good agencies ask the question, “What is the objective of this assignment?” Unfortunately, most clients are surprisingly unprepared with a good answer. bit.ly/3LToIiS
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Now that AI is demonstrating its ability to accomplish many of the tasks required to deploy a marketing campaign, migrating to a new revenue model is both a strategic and financial imperative. bit.ly/3UcJ6zi
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Why are so many agencies just heads-down filling scopes of work pre-defined by their clients? Because neither agencies nor their clients have stopped to decide what constitutes a “valuable” relationship in the first place. bit.ly/46wwvwI
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The best way to lower your operating expenses? Focus your business strategy.
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