Do you give clients a compelling reason to choose you over the competition? Or do you sound the same as everyone else?

If you haven’t found your uniqueness you can’t communicate value effectively and life will be harder than it should be. Finding and positioning your uniqueness is the essential foundation for a strong business because it shifts the balance of power in the buy-sell relationship.

I can help define clear points of differentiation between you and your competitors and align your offer to create more demand and opportunities.

Engaging and relevant content brings your positioning, point of view and perspective into sharp focus. It helps attract new clients, retain existing ones, and makes it easier for the best prospective employees to say “yes”. Amongst other things.

But creating engaging and relevant content takes time and commitment.

So if you’re not content with your content speak with me. I can help with opinion pieces, case studies, award entries, thought leadership, blogs, podcasts, infographics, e-books, videos and more.

Because developing new content for your agency is often a good way of developing your agency.

The word “Mentor” comes from Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey in which Odysseus journeys home from the Trojan War. Along the way he encounters many perils and all of his crewmates are killed. Odysseus survives by taking guidance and warnings from seagulls, shepherds and fishwives.

If your crew would benefit from help on their own epic career journeys, think of me less as fishwife and more as experienced tour guide, knowledgable taxi driver or wise counsel. Whether it’s helping your top thinkers think or account managers manage, mentoring offers the type of personal engagement many employees appreciate.

The benefits can be epic and everyone survives. Which is nice.

How good is your exit strategy? Oh. Although to be fair you’re not alone.

So when is the best time to start planning an exit strategy? (Hint: it’s not as you head for the exit).

And where to start? (Hint: it’s not at the beginning).

Equally contrary is that the things you need to do to plan your exit are the things that will make you want to stay. I know. Who’d have thought it. It’s time to unth!nk.

At the top there’s often no one to listen to YOU. At least no one who can meaningfully help. Your partner or pet are - quite reasonably - uninterested because of frequent exposure. In any case they’ll never understand the pressures you’re facing.

Only someone who’s faced those same pressures can really understand. Whether it’s venting off, discussing strategy for the business, how best to remunerate the team, or how to take more time off, you talk, I listen. I’ll provide independent oversight, constructive challenge, and options for you to consider.

It’ll save you relationship counselling fees and the cat will appreciate it.

Do you have methodologies, models, tools and techniques that give clients the confidence you know more than they do and can deliver reliable, repeatable results?

Because without the right tools you’ll lose control and credibility. It’s the difference between being seen as an expert agency that merits control of a project or an order-taker agency that needs directing.

Put simply, good work requires us to work good. So if your tools require sharpening or you need another tool in the toolbox… step into my workshop.

We don’t buy a diamond for its inherent value determined by colour, cut, clarity and carat. What we’re really buying is the reaction of others.

Which is why pricing is one of the most strategic yet overlooked and under-thought decisions an agency can make.

So what are your clients really paying you for? And are you in business to make a profit, or to serve customers who are willing to pay you a profit?

For priceless advice that doesn’t cost the earth, give me a call.

Does your account team give your creative team great briefs so they’re covered? Or do they leave them naked? Are their briefs birth certificates or death certificates, with a life (or death) of their own?

Your creative team have to work what they’re given. And if the brief has issues, so will the end result. But write a good brief and the job is half done.

Yet too often a brief is written for the wrong audience. Because writing a good brief is not about what the client wants. It’s the art of turning what your client wants into what their audience wants to hear. Just ask Michelangelo and Mick Jagger. Or rather, brief me, and I’ll show you how they both benefitted from the freedom of a tight brief.

Strategic client management is not just about retaining business, but increasing it.

The standard agency approach - asking if you can get more from clients by cross-selling - is not the answer. That’s because cross-selling starts with your needs - expecting the client to buy what the agency has to offer. Instead think ‘cross-serving’ because that requires an understanding of what clients actually care about - their needs.

To be ‘situationally fluent’ - responding to the demands of specific moments of the client lifecycle - put your agency first by putting your agency second.

If you’re running a creative agency then, when it comes to it, ideas are your only currency.

I can help if you’re stuck for ideas or pushed for time and need a kick start, would value a different perspective, need help wading through a dense brief (or lack of one) or simply want to rapid prototype some early directions to help inform your thinking.

I can help you interpret information, find insights, connect them, define points-of-difference (and parity) and propose creative platforms and strategic directions through ideas and words.

Is your new business development focused on pushing or pulling? On presentation or conversation? Do you lead with your what or your why? Do you command or simply comply? Are you matching your message to the moment in the customer lifecycle?

The answers matter because how you sell shapes what prospective clients buy, and what they buy shapes every aspect of your business. Which is why you should try and lose the client before you try and land the client.

Because you are what you eat.

Whose responsibility is it to develop the project strategy? Should the project strategy inform the creative strategy, or vice versa? Should a strategy always come before a plan? Are your project strategies actually plans or schedules? And what even is a strategy…?

…it’s hardly surprising that if there’s one word that strikes fear into the heart and creates confusion in the head of an Account Manager it’s “strategy” (ok, maybe it’s a close second to “forecast”).

Yet project strategy is one of the keys to unlocking the success of an agency. So here’s a strategy worth following: get me in to have a chat with them. I’ll help them answer these and other gnarly questions and I’ll help them understand why not thinking about strategy is often the best way to develop a great strategy.

Does how you describe your agency need to better reflect where you are, or where you're going? Does writing an award entry induce a cold sweat?

Alas, as The Bard wrote: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

But finding thoughtful new words for your business is often a good way of finding new business. And reassuring words can bring the warm glow of success.

So if you’re ever lost for words, you should have a word with me.