It was whilst I was parachuted into a big client I had a sudden epiphany. It was something I was used to seeing all too often but then it struck me. I was in a board meeting with the CEO, CFO, Sales Director and a few other key people and they said, look we don’t have a clue what we are doing. We have used a handful of agencies and have now even hired an in-house digital specialist but we still aren’t getting results.

They said it’s stifling our growth and our ambition, for the last few years, we have
gone nowhere. We are just about standing still. We are a multi-million turnover
business but we are stuck and pulling our hair out trying to understand any of it. Where are we going wrong?

So I said we need to hear it direct from the source. So we rescheduled and met with the agency’s in-house specialist and the rest of the management team.

After 15 minutes of gentle interrogation, I realised an interesting dynamic which I had seen all too often before.

The management team had no idea about any of the concepts the agency described and were lost at the technical language used. The in-house marketing manager understood most of it and had good basic knowledge but not enough to challenge the strategy, and when they did they were “ganged up on” by the agency and quickly backed down.

So the agency had the company by the balls. There was no 2 directional debate, you could simply accept what the agency told you or pick another one once your contract had run its course. And this was set to repeat itself because the root cause hadn’t been resolved, and the relationships with agencies were toxic at best and unhealthy for the business.

SOUND FAMILIAR?