Grow or die. It's embedded in the capitalist psyche. But is there such a thing as "bad" growth? Or more to the point, "bad" profit?

If you want the attention of an agency leader, manager, or department head, you’ll have to wait until they get a break in the action from the latest new business pitch. In agencies of all types and sizes, new business presentations are all-consuming.

By definition, “average” means the center of the bell curve — the place where most people and companies live. Average isn’t always a bad thing, such as average life expectancy. But in the realm of business strategy, average can be lethal.

While these unstable times make it infernally difficult to forecast your fiscal year revenue, there is a set of attributes and behaviors that can help foretell your firm’s long-term success. These are leading indicators, meaning they are predictive and diagnostic — the actions and attitudes that produce outsized financial and reputational capital for your firm.

Why do formerly successful agencies experience stall-out? It’s almost always because they are busy solving yesterday's problems instead of exploring today’s opportunities.

Are you unwittingly cultivating less committed professional relationships when you tell the people in your firm that you trust them, then put in place dozens of ways of auditing how they work and spend their time?

Strengths contribute everything; weaknesses contribute nothing. Such was the conclusion of the brilliant Peter Drucker after decades of consulting with some of the world’s best companies.

What exactly constitutes success in context of a professional services business like an advertising agency? Should success be defined exclusively in financial terms? Is it more about reputation and recognition?

Has your billable time ever been scrutinized? If you work for an advertising agency or other type of professional services firm, chances are you have been subject to a battery of billable time evaluations, all designed to achieve one thing in the mind of the agency owner: maximize productivity.

Countless agencies confuse having a philosophy with having a positioning. A positioning is a strategy, not a tag line.

At a time when prospective clients are scarce, it’s easy to be lured into the belief that some new business is better than no new business. The self-talk among agency executives is that the account “will help keep the lights on.”

What is the primary reason agencies don’t deliver more innovative solutions for their clients? Lack of talent? Lack of time? In my experience, the latter is much more of a factor than the former. Most successful agencies have some pretty smart people.

You would like your employees – or team members – to work harder. To care more about the agency and its clients. To put in more time, show more effort, or do a better job. Agency managers reason that what’s needed is to motivate employees with the promise of more money – a chance to earn more if they’ll work more.

Because most agencies run their businesses based on hours and time, they have come to believe that what they’re selling – and what clients are buying – is efficiency. That’s nonsense. When you take your car to the shop, are you buying fast work or good work?

Two advertising professionals, Ken Starling and Julie Brighton, both worked 2,000 hours last year. Of those 2,000 hours, Ken billed 1,765 to client project work. Julie’s billable hours were 1,326. Which of these two executives was most productive?

Agencies, like most businesses in today’s economy, are going to great lengths to avoid risk. It’s easy to assume that the least risky path is to pull in your horns and keep plowing forward with your current business model. This is essentially the strategy of “just try harder.”

Most of these financial reports are merely a summary of lagging indicators; they are like looking in the rear view mirror. They give you an understanding only of what has happened, but very little understanding of what is likely to happen in the months and years to come.

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