DBA Lock, stock and seven smoking steps to success

It’s 8.30am on a rainy Wednesday morning and Dianne and I are comfortably sat snacking on the world’s largest croissant and sipping on piping hot coffee in Patisserie Valerie, Spitalfields. Casually breakfasting on Become profits your thinking, however you would be slightly mistaken, we are here today as part of the Design Business Association’s breakfast meeting, a morning of conversation led by speaker Chris Merrington Founder of Spring 80:20. A successful coaching and consulting company that aims to help design and advertising agencies increase their profits through understanding the culture of their agency, the importance of their people, the agency’s positioning and the relationships they have with their clients.

Chris was a brilliant presenter, full of energy and insightful findings into the success of advertising and design agencies. The crux of Chris’s presentation was in order for organic growth to be founded and for profits to increase, agencies must keep thing simple and take the time to step back and think about their specific specialism and their unique positioning within the creative industry. Through establishing this, they can then plan their approach to new business, be confident and no when to turn down specific opportunities that could deter the agency from their long-term strategy and tailor their current client –agency relationships into long lasting ones where communication is based on a peer-to-peer relation rather than buyer to supplier.

Other findings in successful agencies was a strong culture – not just Friday afternoon drinks – but a strong sense of pride and belonging within the agency, a strong senior team that encourages more midweight and junior creatives to step up, avoiding dependency on one or two demanding clients, an understanding of the financial aims and gains of the agency across the whole team and knowing when to be niche and specialist either by sector or brand.

Although we are a recruitment agency, not a design one, we both came away feeling that a lot of what Chris had presented was very transferable to our agency too. The importance of good people is always key and something which we of course know being specialists in that field, but there was many other valid points that Chris raised about positioning, the culture of a business, knowing your specific offering and tailoring new business plans that can be applicable to many different businesses including creative recruitment.

Thanks DBA for a great morning!