Essential questions to consider when evaluating your future business model.

Is your firm pursuing “next practices” instead of just following the current best practices? To what degree is your firm the agency of the future?

To find out, get the senior management team of the agency together and ask these important questions:

Product

1. What is the real value we need to deliver to become more relevant to our clients?
2. How can we make sure our clients are getting not only excellent brand management, but excellent brand strategy?
3. What do we need to do to extend idea generation beyond the creative department?
4. How can we break down the traditional department silos and get all functions engaged in developing cross-channel solutions?
5. What additional skills or capabilities do we need to effectively make the transition from mass communications to one-to-one communications?
6. How can we apply as much creativity to where message placement as we do message creation?
7. In a world of multichannel collaboration, who in the agency is the gatekeeper of ideas?
8. What’s stopping us from recommending more non-traditional solutions?
9. What else can we do to be more channel-neutral?
10. How can we create more value for our clients in the purchase and post-purchases phases (not just the pre-purchase)?
11. How do we effectively deal with the increasingly blurred lines between advertising and PR?
12. What do we need to do to make digital part of the fabric of the agency instead of a specialized department?
13. How can we retool the production function to be more versatile and creative?
14. How can we demonstrate more accountability in our client relationships?

People

1. How could we change to way we assign or organize teams to make sure we have our best people working on our best clients?
2. How can we flatten or collapse our organizational structure to provide better client access to our best people?
3. What are the disincentives for working collaboratively and how can we remove them?
4. How can we change roles or titles to better reflect what we really do?
5. In which areas do we need the most training and professional development or add to our knowledge or skills?
6. Could we use a talent management system for both internal and external human resources?

Promotion

1. How can we use social networking and social media to market our own brand?
2. What can we do to promote ourselves in way that violates the expected and goes outside the norms of agency self-promotion?
3. How can we create news about the agency in unconventional ways?

Process

1. Which agency processes create the most value for clients and how can we invest more in them?
2. Similarly, which agency processes create the least value for clients and how can we invest less in them?
3. How could we radically streamline our critical processes to deliver the same benefits to clients?
4. What can we do to remove the parts of our processes that cause client frustration?
5. How can the agency adapt to the changing nature of our work (not finite and linear, but rather infinite and cyclical)?
6. What do we need to do to make pricing more of a core competency of the agency?
7. How can we make the move from cost-based compensation to value-based compensation?
8. How could the agency profit more from its own intellectual property?

Place

1. Does our current office layout and working environment really allow people to do their best work?
2. How can we improve the virtual ways in which we work with our clients (beyond conventional e-mail)?
3. What other tools or resources do we need to work more effectively with one another and with clients?
4. How can we leverage technology to further differentiate the agency and provide more value to clients?

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