Insights

Since several factors are coming together to affect agencies’ commercial performance, I wanted to share a couple of places where I see this manifesting itself.

Lately I’ve been helping a few marketing agencies with their pricing strategy as part of my work as a business development consultant, so now seems like a good time to share some of the pricing strategies we employed at Rise at Seven to get to £12m billed in our first 3 years.

Jim Collins famously says that in order to become great, companies need to “first get the right people on the bus, in the right seats...and then figure out where to drive it.” Please indulge me while I torture this metaphor into agency shape and tell you exactly what I think you should do about it.

Many of the new business opportunities you lose (or most that you don’t hear back from) don’t go to other agencies…they go nowhere. Here are 5 trade-offs clients make when they choose not to give us (or someone else) the work.

Whenever anyone asks me to tell the story of Rise at Seven, I casually mention that we won global fashion brand Missguided when we were six weeks old and it never fails to get a reaction. This is the story of how that deal happened.

Several of my clients are hiring right now, so I’m returning to recruitment scorecards fairly often.

If you’ve ever thought to yourself “why am I the only one who seems to be thinking seriously about [new technology]?”...this one is for you.

I believe there are five simple questions with answers that, between them, decide almost everything about the agency’s strategy. This pricing question is one of them.

In a competitive pitch process, do you want to go first, last, or in the middle?

I’ve helped a handful of agencies to reposition themselves in the last few months and one question has been pretty consistent: should we say we’re “AI-enabled” (or “AI-first” or “AI-powered” or some variation)?