Agency: Starting a Creative Firm in the Age of Digital Marketing (Advertising Age)

Process is what separates the companies that maintain their quality while growing and those that turn mediocre.

This means that the way your company stands out in the crowd is through the careful, expert management of the money you do have. This does not mean penny-pinching. It means efficient and intelligent allocation of your money and rigorous waste management.

in the end, in the long run, among well-run shops, these all balance out, and by and large the shops get roughly the same amount of revenue for the same amount of work.

Process isn’t something you will get to set up and then forget about. It’s a garden, requiring constant care. A garden that half of your team will hate.

Process is the collection of policies, habits, rules, guidelines, and documentation by which the employees of your company work together to get things done.

Ideas are the currency of our business. They’re worth millions of dollars. I’m not going to hand over ideas that could be huge in exchange for out-of-pocket costs. It’s incumbent on us to take a stand or we’re doomed to be a commodity.”3

I also believe that the environment in which we live—where marketing can take myriad forms rather than just a television spot or a magazine ad—dictates that we need to exhibit our expertise across multiple marketing platforms.

I cannot overemphasize the importance of answering anonymous questions from the employees.

Our most effective company meeting format was exactly that: ten minutes for a brief update from management, then updates on departments or individual projects from various employees, ending with a series of answers to questions anonymously submitted from the employees.