About Agency Pathway: A monthly series detailing the happenings at my agency Empower, founded in 2014. You can find previous episodes here.

Highlights

Lessons

What is an agency?

It is a business that provides a service to others.

We’re migrating to a new agency management tool that integrates several of the tools we previously used separately but bolted together.

At the core of productive is the company. The clients that we service.

Having our clients at the centre of our agency makes sense. They are why we are here in the first place.

For me as an agency founder, my most important job is speaking to clients – not currently working with us and prospective.

What makes this easier is that my clients are working on causes they presumably believe in,  I profits that are progressive.

I couldn’t do this at an agency that offers a partition service  a disparate range of clients – hotels, drinks companies, airlines, ecommerce startups. I would think that everyone working here is doing it for the money- either the client if they owners the business, or the team doing it for a pay check

I’m not trying to moralise here or say one is better, but I know I’m more motivated to developer excellence in service of an organisation, through the agency that I co-founded, if my team and I, and the clients we work with, have are motivated to further the cause of the organisations we’re working for.

Would I be wealthier if I served more private sector clients? Most likely. 

Would  be as wealthy? Not financial, but in value of the work I do and the people I work with? most likely not.

Reading

I’ve started reading The Boutique by Greg Alexander.

A shirt shape read that ends each chapters with a series for questions, designed to take a hard look at your agency business and incentivising you to give straight answers in return – or find them.

Some of the questions from the chapter covering xx for example, include 

Being honest in answering these questions means both showing a level of understanding of the fundamentals of your agency but also clear indicators of where the gaps are.

Elsewhere