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Tim Williams Tim Williams

Before You Change Your Practices, Change Your Mind

Business professionals have a voracious appetite for learning the “best practices” in their industry. They want to know what has worked for other companies so they can replicate these approaches in their own firms.

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Tim Williams Tim Williams

Stop Filling Orders and Start Solving Problems

The decline in the perceived value of advertising agencies can be closely correlated with their increasing propensity to dutifully fulfill “scopes of work” rather than proactively solve client problems.

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Tim Williams Tim Williams

You’re Not Overservicing, You’re Underscoping

If your internal teams are continually raising the red flag about projects that are “over estimate,” this is almost always a misdiagnosis of the problem. The vast majority of agency assignments haven’t been properly scoped.

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Tim Williams Tim Williams

How to Be a Price Maker Instead of a Price Taker

Most firms feel they’re stuck on a treadmill when it comes to agency compensation. Actually, it’s more of a time warp. That’s because the cost-plus model employed in most agency-client agreements dates back to the early days of the industrial age.

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Tim Williams Tim Williams

You Don’t Sell Your Own Product As Well As You Sell Your Client’s

It’s a curious fact that advertising agencies don’t know much about selling — at least when it comes to selling their own brand. Even though agency professionals show good sense (and sometimes sheer brilliance) when crafting messaging strategies for their clients, this is rarely applied to how they market themselves.

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Tim Williams Tim Williams

A Gross Failure of Imagination

Do you feel locked in a zero-sum game with the professional buyers of your services (procurement)? Most firms do. A zero-sum game is one in which gains for one party result in losses for the other party. In effect, each party is fighting for a bigger slice of the same pie.

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Tim Williams Tim Williams

Transparency Is For Windows, Not Pricing Professional Services

The last time you bought a new pair of shoes, did you first demand to know the costs that went into manufacturing them? It seems like a ridiculous question because buyers rarely (if ever) have visibility into the costs of the seller. Except in the professional services business.

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Tim Williams Tim Williams

Busy Fools vs. Eureka Moments

If your firm sells hours, how do your clients know if they're paying for "busy fools" or "eureka moments?" This is the provocative question raised by David Meikle in How to Buy a Gorilla. The billable hour, while arguably an easy thing to track, is not an easy thing to value.

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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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