How did I do it?

In the first few months, I aimed to sort out all the accounting functions of the agency to bring everything up to scratch. This allowed for better drilling down and give the directors a finger on the pulse of how the agency is running at the click of a button.
If we need to know how profitable an account is, if we need to understand which areas of the agency are doing well or if we want to have forecasts for the rest of the year we can usually simply fish the data out in a matter of minutes.
This is incredibly empowering. Once everything was up and running smoothly I wanted to see how we can use these numbers to improve the way Switch works. Both for the agency itself and for its clients.
One of the biggest challenges we’re facing here is that the way agencies have worked traditionally is incongruent with the way we see ourselves going forward.
In my first few months here I learnt that traditionally agencies would rely heavily on commissions for income. Book an advert here, book an advert there and skim a percentage off that when billing the client. This needed a structure that could take silly amounts of cash-flow in and out to allow for enough revenue at the end of the year to scrape by.
In addition, we had a major issue with this model because it is not collaborative, and was therefore against our company values. It did not encourage us, as an agency, to think in the best interests of our clients.
It promoted spend for the sake of it. If we’re being paid our fees on spend, then our best interests are at odds with the best interests of our clients. Why fight for a discount on an ad if it means we’re earning less on it?

What comes next?

So now, armed with a much clearer picture of all that goes on in the business, the next step is allowing our clients to enjoy the benefits of working in a much fairer practice.
We’re moving away from a commission model. We’re working on a way of doing business that helps us build better relationships with clients. We are doing this by showing them that we’re on their side, not trying to make them spend more to earn more.
We bill our clients for the time we spend working on their projects. Whether it’s negotiating rates on their behalf, coming up with creative ideas, planning strategy for their campaigns or making their lives easier in any other way.

How is it affecting us?

Has it had an impact on our turnover? Yep – we’ll probably be billing much less than we did in previous years. However, we’ll also be in a much healthier position than we were in previous years because we’re building a level of trust and transparency that clients aren’t used to seeing.
It also works in our favour because a client is usually much happier to pay for our fees if we’re bringing their overall marketing spend down. It makes it much easier for us to justify spending money on us if we’re giving much better ROI.
Personally, as the person who’s handling cash-flow and who leads the administration team, this makes my life much easier. I am now dealing with less paperwork and less cash-flow that leaves very little margins at the end of the day.
The workload on the rest of the team hasn’t really changed. We’ll still research the best places to book advertising and we’ll negotiate on behalf of a client – but we’ll pass any discounts we get straight on to them.
The only areas in which we charge a rate that’s based on spend is on online advertising – and there’s complete transparency there too. The amount of paperwork that’s involved in dealing with small regular payments has to be covered somehow, but we make this transparent to our clients.
Going forward we’d like to see this financial transparency across the board in the industry. It would make agencies a better place to work at and give clients a much better impression of our industry in the long term.
Till then I’m going to continue working to create an agency that runs as smoothly as it possibly can. Both for our happiness and for the benefit of our clients.

The post Setting up the agency of transparency appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Digital is Human

We launched recently and already have a tonne of responses (and we haven’t even started boosting properly yet!). Digital is Human will be a series of free lessons on marketing for humans and two lessons will be uploaded in the form of blog posts every week. We kick off on the 2nd of June with Rik’s post which will be an introductory one. This is going to be a huge team effort and is the first of it’s kind on this beloved rock of ours.

 

^ Jus’ sayin’

BeeWits

If you haven’t heard, BeeWits has pretty much exploded thanks to the Hourly Rate Generator Tool
We’ve also got over 1000 subscribers to the BeeWits newsletter (1663 to be precise) … that’s not quite over 9000 but we’re getting there! We’ve been mentioned on LifeHacker.com, FastCoDesign, CreativeBloq, DesignTaxi and Contently and it generated more than 2000 shares over Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn etc and @BeeWitsApp got mentioned and retweeted hundreds of times

also here’s a lovely blog post which will give you great resources if you need some contracts.

The Office Bloggers

Simon’s blog post has just been published and you can find out what he has to say about client/agency relationships – really worth a read! Teri will be up next with hers.

The A-Z of Digital Marketing

We’ve gone back to primary school and started a new series of blog posts (no more 10 before 10:00) called The A to Z of Digital Marketing. Monday’s blog post was on A for analyse, next Monday’s will be B for Brand, the week after that will be C for Content, the week after that will be D for Devel- you see where this is going.

 

The Intro Series

Here’s Richard’s guide for writing a Digital Brief, part of the Intro series – a series of blog posts served to provide an introduction to digital marketing and which explains particular topics in more detail.

Aaaand that’s it.
Quite a productive week if I may say so myself!

Of course we do more than send out office e-mails in order to improve our office spirits. We emphasise team work in everything we do, “Stop collaborate and listen” is more than just a Vanilla Ice lyric for us – it’s policy. That’s why every Friday we meet in the boardroom for a brain storming session where each week a different member of staff puts together a presentation, game, or team building activity.

Apart from that we’ve got The Office Bloggers series where every week a different person from the office writes a blog post about what it is that interests them about their job. This shines a light on everyone’s work and shows the dynamic characters found in an industry like ours while giving a voice to even the quietest person in the office.
If that’s not enough we’ve got the ultimate secret weapon which brings us all together – a love of food. To some of us food is functional, to others it’s a passion – either way, the quickest and easiest way to get us all into a room for a chat and a laugh is through food.It’s also the best way into our hearts, so if you ever show up on our doorstep please bring cookies.
So what do you think – is it time for you to focus more on the people behind the work? Is it time for you to become more human?

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Ever since we saw Google employees getting to their canteen by jumping into a big red tube or getting to the floor below by sliding down a fireman’s pole we’ve thought that office 2.0 is the bee’s knees. I challenge any of you to see the early office scene in the Matrix and not be depressed by the never ending grey cubicles and stark, white lighting. Ok, so I’ve tackled two extremes, but still, many offices still look and feel like that dreaded pre-Matrix cubicle Neo’s struggling to escape from.

But are dress-up days and office holidays conducive towards a more productive office with better, more valuable outcome?

Office space personalisation is also spread across a vast spectrum. At the one end you have an office with barely more than a framed photo of one’s spouse. At the other you have completely unique and different workspaces designed by the individual employees to make them feel more at home. You do, after all, spend more time in your office than you do in your home (awake). If the office architecture and policy allows it, employees should be able to indulge in this personalisation. It even helps to improve client relationships when you meet at your desk, by bonding over items that both parties are interested in – ‘I love your mini cactus garden…didn’t know you had green fingers!’
When Steve Jobs designed Pixar HQ, there was only one place you could go use the bathroom – the central atrium. This meant that people from all departments, departments like accounts and design who would never normally mingle, met and interacted with each other on a regular basis. We bridge this gap in other ways, since our office is a far cry in size from the acres that Pixar is spread across. On foodie days, everyone cooks up a specific type of dish for our pot-luck lunch. We stop work early on a Friday for an office brainstorm – all to try and push cross-department interaction as much as possible.

Being a creative agency does mean that we can afford to think and act outside the box, but every company can help improve their employees’ office experience. I once read a quote along the lines of ‘What happens if I train my staff and they leave? Well, what happens if you train your staff and they don’t leave?’ Borrowing a bit from this, making your staff happier and helping get their creative juices flowing by improving their surroundings is also imperative for greater staff retention.
I can’t say whether the way we work improves our outcome or not, all I know is that it feels great to work here. As to the results of our work, why not see for yourself?

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