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

the vast majority of the perks you see at America’s celebrated workplaces, such as Google, are both well beyond your means and unnecessary.

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.

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

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.

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.

Believing you need to spend three hours cleaning up an Excel spreadsheet because it is a small piece in a larger puzzle of achieving a vision is much more powerful than your doing it for a paycheck.

You must tell them about your vision, over and over. Unrelentingly. Forever.

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.

Think about the things that go without saying, and say them. You want to make money. You want your clients to be happy. You care about design or your trade. You have opinions about your trade.