In The Long and Winding Road, our late founder, Tony Mikes, shared his Six Agency Financial Rules. Since then, we’ve identified additional steps agency ...

Here’s a war story. Two partners started an agency years ago. At the time, their lawyers and accountants told them to set a value ...

Obviously, a potential successor needs a different set of qualifications, experience and character traits than someone you’re predominantly hiring for a specific skill set ...

Whether or not you believe in climate change or global warming, there is no denying that the human species generates mega-tons of waste and pollutants ...

We often hear from ad agency managers regarding the difficulty of getting people to fully adopt and use agency management or workflow systems. Managers want ...

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 ...

Nathan Rothschild of the great European banking family is supposed to have said that “the time to buy is when there is blood in the ...

What’s the big deal about write-offs? No one sees them on the income statement, therefore, nothing to worry about. Right?

Every year, ad agencies ...

A friend who owns a smaller ad agency (currently 13 people on staff) called me last week to catch up. I’ve worked with his ...

Many an ad agency owner flies solo all through his or her career. This may be due to a number of factors, sheer passion for ...

I visited an agency earlier this year and was intrigued by a comment the owner had made. 

“We don’t bother with client P&Ls ...

I recently read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, a 2012 social psychology book examining human moral foundations, and how people’s differences in prioritizing ...

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 ...

How many ad agency owners have asked about the return on investment (ROI) on their accountants?

How many owners of agencies completely and implicitly trust ...

Ad agencies and marketing firms sell planning as a service to their clients, and promote its benefits as only true converts can. But agencies suffer ...

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

Too many clients today are so focused on cost-cutting, they ignore the most essential part of effective marketing—customization. You can’t order custom marketing ...

OK, pull out your devices and dial in some old REM from 1985. It’s time to get deep into green mode… yes, it’s ...

Agencies are just as surely business enterprises as they are creative and service organizations. For agencies to be behind in monthly tracking of agency finances ...