DELIVERING PERFORMANCE
People
We must recruit, develop and retain the best talent. Despite the amazing enhancements in technology, it is still people that we deal with and people who create what we do. People are our currency, so we must invest in them. Leaders must motivate, coach, mentor, direct, acknowledge, reward, and retain our talent. We must build a recruitment process, a performance management process and a reward & recognition process that focuses on the goal to recruit, develop and retain the best talent.
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We must understand that we only borrow our employees for a period of time. It is the role of a leader to create an environment where talent can flourish and soar. They need to be able to look at themselves at the end of each year and see how they have grown and developed. They should develop so much that they can get a job anywhere they want to. At the same time, we must create an environment where the last thing they want to do it leave.
People must feel valued, respected, and listened to. They must feel vested in the business so that they can enjoy the good times but also go to battle for the business in the bad times. To me, and maybe I am become too emotionally vested, but to me work colleagues become a second family. You laugh when they laugh, and you cry when they cry.
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Product
By Product, I mean what you do, what your clients come to you for. It may be a physical product or a service. The service could be around creativity, technology, support, or labour. It could be delivered onshore, nearshore, or offshore. None of these variants exclude the need to obey one simple rule, “deliver for today whilst Innovating for tomorrow”.
The work that you do for clients today pay the mortgage but at the same time, if you are not already looking at industry trends and the changing market needs, you won’t have a product or service to deliver tomorrow. Along with your Product, you need your proposition.
This is far more that a positioning statement, it defines not only what it is that your business does, but more importantly it identifies why clients will buy your product. Your proposition shapes internal and external language, your recruitment, your approach and response to pitches. It should link into your Vision for your business, your Business Goals, your Values and Culture. It doesn’t drive them but it must be intrinsically linked to them.
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Process
As an agency grows larger, as its products and services broaden and its client base expand, it is more and more important that you have the right processes in place. This is not just about project and workflow management. The need for the right processes run through a business as it grows. It supports Finance, HR, Facilities, IT as well as the more production focuses areas.
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There are several key principles to introducing process management software to ensure that you gain the real benefits from the software.
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Understand what you want the system to do and write a brief that reflects what you want. This is a fundamental starting point as it ensures that you are in control and not being driven by what various ‘off the shelf’ systems do. To write this brief, you have to ensure that you know what you need. To do this, you must fully review your current systems and processes, you need to understand what legacy elements are desirable and what you need to move away from. To do this you need a BA to step back and break down your processes and fully document them.
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Once you have completed the analysis of what you currently, you need to challenge yourself as to why you do them. This is the chance to clean house. The last thing you want to do it introduce an expensive workflow management system and 6 months later start to change it.
Another role that the BA needs to perform is benefit analysis. In simple terms this is looking at the current way that you work and how you will work with the new system in place. The first task is to ensure that there is a benefit.
This can be cost, time, accuracy, documentation, audit trail etc. Once the overall benefits are seen, the allocation of efforts and resource needs to be reviewed. It may be the case that overall, there is an efficiency and saving in efforts. More often, this could be associated with a shift in effort between departments. If there is an overall gain, then the benefits are clear.
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The final point on process is that you always need a champion for your product (what the business sells). The role of this champion is to always ensure that the end product/service is not diluted, lessened or weakened by the incoming process/software. After all, it is the product that your clients by and so it must be protected at all cost.
So often people try to over complicate things. They create layer upon layer that reads great in a publication, but is far too complicated for the average business to deliver. Particularly when leadership teams are over worked and rarely have time to lift their heads and look at the horizon, let along beyond it! I believe and my success has proven it, business success can be driven by a framework of Six facets, my Six P’s.
Place
Until early 2020, this section would have been about the physical environment. About how it is particularly important that you create a workspace that encourages; productivity, social interactions, allows creativity to spark and generally is a great place to work. So much has changes since the pandemic that we should talk about environment not place.
So, this is no longer about just the physical, but it is about the metaphysical. It covers everything that influences how people feel in relation to work. It obviously still includes the central place of work, technical infrastructure that supports remote working, culture and social connections, company communications and many more factors that make your company a great place to work.
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When people join my company, I tell them that I want them to grow and develop so that they can get a job anywhere they want to. At the same time, I will create an environment that will mean the last thing they want to do it get a job somewhere else.
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So how do you create such an environment?
You need to give people a reason to come into your building. Yes, you can have an agile working policy but in order to have engaged talent that wants to work for you, you cannot rely just on rules that say they must come into the building. You must create a need. Your building must become a resource that people want to use. They will use it for team and project meetings, for brainstorming session, for client presentations.
It will provide them with technology and infrastructure to help them perform. It will act as a social hub from which you can run social events and ensure people get real face to face interactions.
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Away from the building your internal communications must adjust to the new way of working Culture is not grown via email, it is grown by personal relationships. As MD I ensure that I meet every new started individually to talk about the business and then on a quarterly basis, I meet with the new started to talk about our Vision, Values and Culture.
This message is reinforced across all staff meetings, departmental meetings, monthly newsletter and through formal processes like performance reviews and recruitment interviews. Our values permeate across all formal and informal communications.
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I have always had the view that work should be what you do and not where you do it. This Pandemic has created an anthropological change in how we work. It is up to leaders to take advantage of this opportunity and drive the transformation, if we don’t, we will become victims of it.
Prospects
You will hear the quote a thousand times and often with numerous different equationsi. Whichever version you pick, it is true that retaining a client is a lot easier than finding a new one. My only caveat to this is that sometimes you do outgrow a client, or the client out grows you.
For current clients it is all about feeling their pain, understanding their challenges. When I left the OEM to work for a WPP company, I waited 3 months before returning to my now client (admittedly I still had my management carpark pass, so it was like I had never really left). One of my ex-colleagues ask what it was like on the other side. I explained that when I was the Brand Manager, I gave the agency my problem and it was then their problem. I then explained that now that I am the agency, once the client had briefed me, it was my challenge and my problem. You can sum it up in two words. ADD VALUE.
When it comes to new business, and I’m not talking about the process to get on a roaster or a bid list, I’m talking about converting an opportunity. Now I’m assuming that you have the right product/service so you can deliver to the brief. I’m also assuming that you can construct an RFQ response in a way that reflects your great offering. So, assuming all of this, it comes down to understanding that the client really wants. What are their key drivers, what are they basing their decisions upon? Some RFQ’s list clearly what the selection criteria are, this is great although, a word of caution, their understanding of the criteria may still differ to yours. If the RFQ doesn’t tell you, ask them. What do you have to lose? The other key fact to try and ascertain is who is the key decision maker? I recently ran a pitch with an OEM in which I had built up a great relationship with the Senior Marketing client. The Pitch was a digital transformation project around moving from a traditional content creation approach to a digital one. We really had a meeting of mind and he shared my vision 100%. The RFQ asked for a written submission with no presentation. This made me nervous as if felt that things were going to be very much down to quantitative not qualitative factors. We received a request for a call with the purchase lead. We had a short call where she asked that we submitted our BAFO, best and final offer. Normally in the OEM’s industry the right creative/tech partner is found and then the negotiation begins, but with this client is was purely on price. We put in a fair discount, but we lost the pitch. Good news is that I’m still in contact with the marketing client so who knows.
Performance
When I talk to people about my 6 P’s they are often surprised that I talk about performance last. There is a simple but fundamental reason for this. I passionately believe that if you can crack the first 5; you have the right people, with the right products, working to the right processes, in the right place with a pipeline of prospects, your performance will come.
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I have been fortunate to work with a great Commercial FD. Together we ran the P&L. I owned it but he ran the details of it as a very experienced accountant. Although I have a degree in Economics and I love numbers, I am a big picture thinker, so this partnership was the perfect fit. I would always insist that the view that I could run the P&L with three pieces of information.
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Net sales revenue. Economists define Net sales as the total revenue generated by a company, excluding any sales returns, allowances, and discounts. In the agency world it is total revenue less third-party costs. Back in the Mad Men days, ad agencies were all about total billing. This is important if you are a media agency where media buying and billing is a large part of what you do. Outside of this, in a world where third party mark up has been almost eradicated by sharp pencilled Purchase Managers, it is only net figures that matter. Net sales growth comes from one of three places, increased charge out rates, additional work form current clients and New Business. New Biz is the life blood of an agency. It not only grows Net Sales, but it allows you to develop and increase your talent base.
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Fixed costs. In textbook terms a fixed cost is a cost that does not change with an increase or decrease in the amount of goods or services produced or sold. Fixed costs are expenses that must be paid by a company, independent of any specific business activities. So, in real terms building, equipment, etc. I look at Fixed costs plus. The plus is things like annual software licences and the sorts of costs that can vary but not in the short term.
Variable costs.
Our textbooks say a variable cost is a corporate expense that changes in proportion to how much a company produces or sells. Variable costs increase or decrease depending on a company's production or sales volume—they rise as production increases and fall as production decreases. For a business that is built around talent, variable cost is staff costs. This can be perm salaries, contractors, freelancers and if you pay it, overtime payments. These are the costs that increase as your business grows and unfortunately, if your business shrinks, this is the first place you have to look to in order to balance the books.
