Over our long career in this business, we have learned several things that have become a credo for agency success.

Agency principals remove themselves from daily account service. They become ...

Claiming an area of focus has long been an advertising agency business strategy. For many agencies, areas of focus evolved naturally, with successful work for one industry client leading to ...

Succession planning is a crucial aspect of managing a business, and for smaller advertising agency owners, the challenge is often compounded by the unique dynamics of the industry. One increasingly ...

A number of years ago, AdAge ran a great article on the occasion of agency Hill Holliday Connors Cosmopulos turning thirty. Hill Holliday, as it is known today, is a ...

It’s a good question: most agencies have an account mix that is far from ideal. Frequently, a single account controls the life of any given agency—a “gorilla,” if ...

You’ve nurtured, fed, hovered over, and perhaps spent every waking minute working on and worrying about your agency. Meanwhile, your agency people, who helped you to grow the business ...

A number of years ago, there was a very interesting article in the New Yorker. The article reported that when you are a contestant on the game show, “Who Wants ...

Think of your brain as a muscle. Regular exercise keeps it in tone, but you need to balance exercise with rest periods to achieve peak function. You may be able ...

Many agency principals have the notion that when they wish to retire, they can sell their agencies to a larger agency, collect their money and start playing golf. While this ...

This is a stressful business. We love it (or, one presumes, we wouldn’t be doing it), but it is definitely stressful. We frequently speak with agency principals who are ...

In Creating a Five-Year Exit Plan: Part 2, we discussed assessing your goals against agency performance to identify areas where you need to improve to meet your goals. In Step ...

In Creating a Five-Year Exit Plan: Part 1, we discussed setting goals as the first step in developing your exit plan. Step 2 is reviewing those goals against current agency ...

Editor’s note: Recently a number of agency principals have asked us about exit plans —how they can transition out of the agency while maximizing income and ensuring that the ...

Recession. Many Second Wind members vividly remember “The Great Recession” from late 2007 until mid-2009. It is such a painful memory that the mere mention of the word “recession” is ...

I had an interesting, and inspiring, discussion while dining with friends. The first part of the discussion covered why it is important to have New Year’s resolutions (as opposed ...

Another year has come and gone: now it’s time to take stock and get an agency plan of action together for the coming year. What follows is a short ...

Working in a service industry like ours requires a clear sense of purpose. If you are not all working as a team toward some ultimate goal, meshing like gears in ...

Advertising agencies are usually fun places to work. They are often non-corporate (some extremely so), frequently playful, and brim-full of interesting, eccentric personalities. Some of those eccentrics are, as happens ...

We should all have such a problem, right? Yet it is not unusual for Second Wind to hear from ad agencies struggling to manage the demands of a booming business ...

In our opinion, there was nothing more dreaded in college than the open book test. The prof could throw just about any kind of curveball question, and you would have ...