An old friend of mine stopped by the office the other day to ask me about our new business process. He has a smaller agency and they’re looking for strategies to help grow the shop. The first time we ever met he was helping us with some of the work connected to launching the Florida Truth campaign. CP+B was about 60 people back then so he’s seen us go through a lot of changes and I think we were both surprised by a lot of what the conversation revealed as the drivers of growth for us. I wanted to jot them down while they were still fresh in my head.

1.       Tell other people your dreams. This was the biggie for us. For years Chuck and I had this secret understanding that we wanted to be a great agency some day. Whatever that meant. But it was one of those aspirations that you didn’t dare say out loud to anybody because it was just too ludicrous. People would laugh and they would point and they would say “There go those guys that wanted to be great!” FAIL! But to succeed you have to risk failure. So eventually decided to tell the whole agency what we wanted to become. Our mission statement. We had a friend who was at Fallon in the early days and he had been a part of creating there’s and I don’t know if I remember it exactly but it was very simple and basically said that they wanted to be, “The most awarded agency in America.” We thought about what we liked about the ad biz and it wasn’t awards it was the culture jamming. So our mission became, “To create the most talked about and written about advertising in the world.” At the time we probably hadn’t yet achieved that goal in Miami or Florida. So it was embarrassingly lofty. My friend was actually shocked to know that that was our mission statement when he first met me. I’m sure he would have laughed had he known. But in the agency we shared this mission with everybody and made little cards to tape to your monitor or desk so that during the day we could make all the hundreds of decisions we were faced with, with that mission in mind. Within weeks the stalemate between the status quo and something new had been broken and the agency began to clearly move toward this new shared goal. Out of the thousands of little decisions that shaped our future you could feel that more than half were suddenly talking us someplace we wanted to go. I wish we had had the courage to do it sooner.

2.       The clients you currently have are your true new business machine. I see so many people overlook this. “If I only had a client like this or a client like that.” It’s key to have a clear idea in your head of the new ground you hope to break and the new case history you hope to prove with each new client before you start work. What is going to be different about the agency six months after the arrival of your new account? How is this new revenue and this new campaign going to make your agency smarter and more capable than it was prior?

3.       Find some real passion in the building for the business or take a pass on it. We have a rule that says we can’t pitch a piece of business unless at least one of the partners is passionate about that business. And billings/money is not an acceptable reason for passion. It can be anything BUT money. Maybe you like that it’s family run. Maybe you love that they’re the underdog. Maybe you love that it’s a chance to build something from scratch. Whatever the reason is find it and if you can’t find a reason say thanks but no thanks. In the end you will be defined by your clients. There are no two ways about that. Such is the lot of the parasites of the business world. Agencies.

4.       Don’t model yourself after other agencies. Stop stealing all the decks from other shops to find a great pitch. Actually, steal them. read them all and visit everybody and find out all you can. Then when you know enough, forget it all and make up your own process and your own pitch. It’s like a Jazz musician finding their unique voice. At the beginning it requires a lot of study and practice and emulation. But in the end nobody should or could sound quite the same. When you find it, your pitch and your process is better than any of them because you can tell it honestly and genuinely. The way to find your pitch might take a while but there’s a real sure fire method. Spend six months to a year making a quick note of every time you’re feeling really good at work and what you’re doing at the time. I guarantee a pattern will arise and with luck it won’t be about lunch or golf.

So that’s four. There were actually a couple others but they can wait for another post and another time.