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Tim Williams Tim Williams

Your Clients Hire You to Be Effective, Not Efficient

The next time a client requests a set of “deliverables,” remember that this is not the real reason your firm was hired in the first place. You were hired to deliver business and marketing outcomes. The deliverables are just a means to that end.

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Tim Williams Tim Williams

Seven Ways To Create New Revenue Streams

Would you like to earn money while you sleep? Most of your clients do.

While most product and service companies have diverse ways of generating revenues, agencies and other professional firms generally don’t make money unless they’re recording hours on a timesheet. “Work a million hours, make a million dollars,” as the saying goes.

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Tim Williams Tim Williams

AIM FOR 100% DIFFERENT

Is doing better enough? Marketing professional Harry Beckwith asks us to imagine the typical year-end company meeting in which the CEO’s approach to continued success is "Let’s look at what we did last year, and do at least 15% better."

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Tim Williams Tim Williams

Strategy Is Deciding What Not to Do

Upon his return to the company he founded, Steve Jobs’ first executive action was to announce that Apple would scrub almost all of the 300+ projects currently under development and instead focus on no more than four.

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Tim Williams Tim Williams

Start Leveraging Strengths Instead of Fixing Weaknesses

Do you perform an annual assessment of your firm’s strengths and weaknesses? Most of the firms in this habit have a similar way of interpreting the results: breeze right past the strengths and instead focus laser-like on the weaknesses. In extreme cases, managers ignore the findings about strengths altogether and quite literally obsess about the weaknesses.

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Tim Williams Tim Williams

Creating An Uncontested Market for Your Firm

If it feels like you’re in an unrelenting race for new business, competing against agencies offering similar services in a similar way, there’s an easy way out: stop offering similar services. The new business frustration experienced by talented agency teams is largely of their own making, the result of getting caught in a cycle of “harvesting” instead of “planting.”

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Tim Williams Tim Williams

Go Beyond Scope of Work to Scope of Value

Agencies are routinely given various “Scopes of Work,” then dutifully proceed to fulfill their client’s requests. But what’s missing from this sequence of events? What should come before the SOW? Our answer: the SOV — Scope of Value.

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Tim Williams Tim Williams

Your Firm is Defined By the Services You Don't Offer

What makes a great restaurant? The things that are not on the menu. The world’s most mediocre restaurants famously have virtually everything on their menus, making them average at everything and excellent at nothing. Similarly, you could argue that a great museum is defined by the things that are not on the walls. 

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Tim Williams Tim Williams

Is Your Firm Incentivized to Be Inefficient?

If there’s one indisputable economic principle, it’s that incentives matter. Inside professional firms, some incentives are obvious and overt. Firms are highly incentivized to issue timely and accurate billing, for example. The consequences of sloppy invoicing manifest themselves quickly in the form of unhappy, frustrated clients. 

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Tim Williams Tim Williams

Why You Should Always Provide Pricing Options

Imagine a coffee shop in which there is only one size coffee. Or an electronics store that sells only one size TV. In the consumer goods world, we are surrounded by options. Small, medium, large, extra-large. Would it make sense for a professional firm — like an agency — to do the same?

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Tim Williams Tim Williams

Why Your Firm Has An Incomplete Business Model

If you’re like most agencies and other professional firms, you’re likely missing a critical component in the model upon which you have built your business. Here's why having a cost structure is not the same as having a revenue model …

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Tim Williams Tim Williams

The Magicians and Logicians of Professional Services

When a talented ad agency transforms the global reputation of a brand through a brilliant marketing program based on unique customer insights, that’s an example of the kind of high-value problem solving professional firms get hired for in the first place. It’s the kind of “magic” that characterizes knowledge work, creative thinking, and professional expertise …

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Tim Williams Tim Williams

Why Your Value Transcends Your Work

When sitting face to face with the buyers of your services, remember you’re not just selling the value of the work you create. The value your firm brings to the table is deep and multifaceted. But don’t count on your client to point them out for you …

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Tim Williams Tim Williams

Costing Is a Science, But Pricing Is An Art

Knowing the costs of serving your clients is important, but it’s not the same thing as knowing how to price your services. Costing is objective and tactical; pricing is subjective and strategic. Costing uses formulas; pricing requires judgment.

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Tim Williams Tim Williams

Is Your Firm Signaling Its Value?

When we walk into a store to purchase a product in a category in which we have no prior experience, how do we make our choice?  Mostly, we depend on value signals.

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Tim Williams Tim Williams

Powered by Beliefs

Exceptionally talented professional firms are distinguished not by what they do, but what they believe.  Their work is unique because their beliefs are unique. They create dissimilar solutions because they have a dissimilar mindset.

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Tim Williams Tim Williams

What Timesheets Don't Tell You

Take away timesheets, and most agency executives will proclaim the end of the world.  But back when agencies were earning average profit margins of 30%, there were no agency timesheets.  Talk about cognitive dissonance.

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Tim Williams Tim Williams

Don't Say "Full Service" Unless You Really Mean It

If your firm uses the term “full service” on its website, here are two good reasons you should stop. First, “full service” is one of the phrases that has officially joined the lexicon of expressions so overused they’ve lost their meaning — words like “quality” and “excellence.”

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