Agency Agony Uncle
Heavy Petting
Dear Uncle Carl,
Having recently been stung by a house builder client going under, owing the agency a lot of money, I’m now worried that our financial clients might also be going through troubled times. How can I avoid being hit by bad debts again? And, in this current climate, with the previous money-spinning sectors of house building and finance now looking shakier, what areas should we focus on? Drink?
Ouch. Wherever possible you should try indemnifying against clients and bad debt. You should review all of your current financial agreements and how you operate. Perhaps you should be considering invoice factoring. Look at the terms of your payments, are you waiting too long to be paid? Can you receive part of the invoice up front? Do you have an effective process in place for chasing overdue payments and bad debt? Do you threaten to charge interest and follow it through? Do you carry on doing work for people who are not up to date with their bills? Are you paying your suppliers for clients who are not paying you, therefore carrying all the risk and in effect becoming a bank for your clients? Make sure your house is in order. Talk to your clients about staged payments – they may be going through severe cash flow problems themselves. Once any one client or sector becomes more than 40% of your GP I would start to worry. As for other sectors, I would suggest Professional Services – Insolvency advisors will be busy!
Dear Uncle Carl,
It’s been suggested that in tough times agencies should be refusing new business pitches to concentrate on servicing the clients that it already has. Would you agree with this? Or is this only suitable for agencies that offer an integrated service and can push clients into areas they don’t already work with us on?
Erm, sounds an odd strategy to me. Wouldn’t that be a bit like having a glass of water in a desert and thinking ‘ooh’ I’m a bit hot, think I will sit here and make it last?’ Personally I would be thankful for what I had and make the most of it but also get off my arse and start looking for more water while I could. The way I see an agency is that certain people who are employed, such as account directors and creative directors, have a responsibility to retain and grow clients regardless of the climate economic or otherwise. You have to do this in order to reduce or slow down any clients dropping off the client list but I am afraid you will NEVER stop losing clients. This is why you should have other people who spend their time and efforts generating new business to feed the machine. So, yes, during hard times you should, if possible, absolutely make sure you are doing everything you can to retain and hopefully grow what you have but you cannot walk away from new opportunities – you will die.
Dear Uncle Carl,
The agency I have just joined has an “office pet.” A dog. While it usually just sits under the desk of our account manager, smelling slightly, it has free reign of the open plan office. Now, most people would – and do – think this is great, but, apart from the smell, I hate dogs. What should I do? Live in fear, and hide every time the dog comes near? Or should I say something and risk being the spoilsport that gets the dog sent home?
Sorry to hear about your account manager smelling slightly. Uncle Carl has a pooch in his office, it’s a fucking nightmare. The little sod smells and chews things – seems to have a taste for computer wires and handbags, while harbouring a love that cannot be spoken for a stuffed superman! Never work with children or animals is the phrase to bear in mind.
My past experiences tell me it’s a bad idea to mix animals and agency staff – the dumb animals get upset, and so do the pets. I once had a member of staff bring a cat in – that stopped pretty quick; a cat for Christ’s sake!
My boss occasionally brought her HUGE dog in which proceeded to terrorise and attack anyone going into her office; not a bad deterrent if you need some peace and quiet. I know of someone else whose boss insisted on having a dog at work, which meant the carpet had interesting stains as it seemed to think it could shit anywhere, which also added a somewhat unattractive odour to the place.
You could simply pack up! But I have to say, I don’t see how an agency environment is an appropriate place for a pet – some agencies I have seen aren’t that appropriate for humans! Why not check out some Health and Safety sites to see what the ‘rules’ are which could then be forwarded anonymously to your HR manager (or office busy-body, there’s always one). Start an anti-dog blog – you will not be the only one who doesn’t like it, trust me. And if you can’t beat them, join them and ask if you can bring in your pet tarantula/dolphin/horse/cockroach/gimp – they have set a precedent whether they like it or not, so it has to be that everyone can bring their pet or no-one can. Failing that, suggest a pet or dogging day – I believe they’re quite popular.
Dear Uncle Carl,
To raise the profile of the agency and hopefully to raise morale amongst the creative team, I was going to enter as many awards as the agency can afford next year. However, unless it’s a D&AD pencil, the creatives say they don’t care about awards. And the account handlers say that they don’t make a difference to new business. So, should I bother?
Awards; I get the feeling sometimes that there is an unspoken suspicion that perhaps as an industry we have got ourselves into an ‘emperors clothes’ type of problem here. Are we all kidding ourselves they really matter? When they really don’t! “Stop it Uncle Carl, don’t blow the myth, we need awards!” I would never enter awards to simply ‘placate’ staff; you enter awards to demonstrate the creativity of your staff but also the abilities within your business, your agency. It is highly likely your staff will at some point fuck off and leave you – the awards are yours to keep not theirs. Do it for yourself if you are proud of the team you have put together, the work they produce and the clients you have. These gongs are a demonstration of your success as a business, they are not part of a staff reward scheme. Who runs your agency, you or your account managers? For fucks sake, strap a pair on!
Entering awards during a credit crunch could be a good strategy as some current awards are very much over-priced and ‘under-subscribed’, so get your mediocre applications in now while others cannot afford to. You may reap some surprising rewards!
Are you troubled? Don’t be. send all your questions for the drum’s agony uncle to dear.carl@carnyx.com Or, If you wish to meet with carl to talk about your business, then simply email him on ch@kloog.ch