Most agencies are born from practitioners who are very, very good at their craft. So, they started an agency or solo practitionership. But the growing work becomes too much, so they hire a person or two or 15 … and BOOM! They have an agency.
While they’re good at their craft, when it comes to running a business, generally, they are not.
Whether through metamorphosis or osmosis, we expect our staff to be able to run, grow and manage a business without ever teaching them. These expectations are inevitably met with: “They just don’t have it. They are just a tactician.” Yes, because you never taught them how to be in business.
In this session, we will discuss the importance of and the “how to” of developing agency professionals that are business-savvy and poised to grow.
About the Presenter: J. Mark Riggs, founder & CEO, Pemberton
Mark is the founder and CEO of Pemberton, a management consultancy that exists to be the go-to resource for marketing/communications agencies to discover and reveal pathways to organic account growth and organizational growth through fiscal and operational efficiencies by changing the mindset of an RFP-obsessed industry.
Mark has a reputation as a business-builder and a strategic counselor and has experience in leading client services, insights and planning functions, as well as developing talent. A creative thinker and problem-solver, Mark believes that great thinking can “come from anywhere,” it’s the ability to harness it and leverage it for clients that makes the intellectual property of the agency valuable and an integral part of the marketing mix.
Before starting Pemberton, Mark spent 20 years in the agency world working for IPG’s Mullen Lowe, an Ad Age A-List Agency, Taylor, the Holmes Report’s Consumer Agency of the Decade, MWWPR and French/West/Vaughan, the Southeast’s largest independent agency where on six different occasions he grew small accounts into multi-million-dollar accounts.