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We all define the ideal client in many ways, but essentially it boils down to two things: the ideal client relationship is one in which you make money and have an appreciable impact on your client. Sure, you want to enjoy the relationship, you want referrals, you want prompt payment, you want to work with a decision maker, and a dozen other things. But those two things are the really important ones: money and impact.

We talked about money last month–this month is about impact.

The Role of Control

How do you get (money and) impact in a client relationship, consistently, month after month? It doesn’t happen without some measure of control in the client relationship. If you’re an order-taker (that’s the opposite end of the spectrum), you’re not an expert, and your recommendations are not considered as seriously as they could be.

So impact doesn’t happen without control, and you know this from your own life outside of work. Unless your physician takes control, he won’t have much impact on your situation. Sure, he will have to listen to you and tailor the treatment to your circumstances, but ultimately he’s got to be the expert or…you’ll just shop for another doctor, who will tell you want you want to hear and be the order taker, whipping out his prescription pad and taking notes as you tell him what you need. This is what your clients often do if they don’t think you’re the expert. Read more

You really have no business starting a business and not making good money, eventually. Money itself is just a tool, for good or bad, but when you start a business you’re declaring your intent to be profitable (after paying yourself a fair wage). Hopefully you’ll make money in an ethical manner, fully understanding the power (for good) that it can have.

Why Making Money is Important

You’ll have your own list of why this is important to you personally, but let me suggest a few things.

First, money is the currency of respect, and it’s just not enough for your marketing advice to be good advice. If you don’t also charge ridiculous amounts of money for it, you’re just a replaceable, marginalized commodity without much impact.

Second, it takes money to keep a good business healthy. You can spread it around for employees, equipment, facility, selling your services, retirement, etc.

Third, money is a very useful tool for your own personal use in changing the world. When I come across a client that is already making lots of money, I try to help them see how they could start a foundation to have even greater impact.

Fourth, you’ll eventually go through a healthy transition where you understand that “life” is better chased outside of the business, and money makes that easier. Read more

Well, this is typically the time when you make New Year’s Resolutions, and maybe one of those is timekeeping compliance. But rather than starting with the thinking behind all this, we’ll save that for last and instead dive right into some suggestions on how to get better participation. If you’re an employee (vs. a principal) reading this, you might want to feather your own bonus bed by taking the lead here and rallying the troops. That sort of sucking up never goes unnoticed. (Though you may never again be asked to join your peers at lunch.)

Before giving you specific suggestions, though, let me note that these are presented in reverse order. That’s because none of them have any teeth unless the last one (getting fired) is a legitimate possibility. That sounds harsh, I know, but there it is. The goal isn’t to fire employees–the goal is to make money in an environment that doesn’t kill creativity. There are many steps that lead up to that harshest of options, but it is there at the end of the steps.

Here’s what we’ve found to be effective in timekeeping compliance.

Escalating War on Deadbeat Timekeepers

1. Start with an assumption that you’ll fire them if they don’t do it. It really would come to that very rarely, but you have to be willing to do it (eventually) or the previous steps don’t work. Building on that, you work backwards to come up with a plan. So just before this step…
2. Dock them a day’s pay by asking them not to come in to work one day. Just before that…Provide a written notice of discipline to put in their personnel file. Just before that…
3. Public humiliation in the town square, like a posted list in a prominent place stating who didn’t complete their time sheet the night before. Just before that…
4. Peer pressure from missed goal. E.g., “if everyone does their timesheets, every day, by 6p, we all get pizza on Friday.” So if one person screws it up, the others will be all over them. Just before that…
5. Throw the problem back to employees. “Timekeeping is very important. That much we know for sure, but what I don’t know is how to get 100% compliance, so you as employees meet and let me know what you think will work. That’ll be better than any plan I come up with and impose. I’d rather you work it out.” Just before that…
6. Apply the policy consistently, which means the principal, too. Yep, unless there’s compliance at the top, you’ll never get anywhere with it. Just before that…
7. Communicate your expectations clearly. For example, what is the policy, and why is this important? More on that later.
8. So those are the steps I’d use. Start by asking yourself if you’d be willing to take the most severe step. If you would, start at the least severe and just work the list. Whatever plan you come up with, make sure it’s consistent in application, it is collaborative as you seek solutions, and that you stage your responses, from friendly grandparent to ruthless czar. Read more

For just a few minutes, I want to get you thinking about how the mix of things you do for clients can have a significant impact on the value they place on your services. Your clients typically have this need to compartmentalize what you do for them, separating the higher and lower level activities and then drawing inferences that put you in a box. Even more than the services you do for them, how you position those services will have a significant impact on the nature of the relationship. After laying out the rationale behind this thinking, this article concludes with five very specific suggestions on wedding strategy with execution.

In many cases there’s no simple way to avoid providing both higher and lower level services to clients, but unless you combine them in a manner that carefully takes your positioning into account, you may find yourself swimming upstream all the time, wishing for a different kind of client relationship.

How It Looks from the Outside

You know what you do, and you aren’t bothered so much by the mix of activities that consume your day. You know what you are capable of and what role the more implementation-oriented activities play in your business. But what does is it look like to an outsider who is trying to absorb every little clue about your positioning? Be honest for a minute and just consider these areas:

• First, does your web site highlight implementation? What do the images capture–the thinking process or the implementation outcome? Does your presentation feature any strategic work you do for clients that might be presented to them in nothing more than text? Would the look of how you tell these stories vary all that much from how the commercial printers you work with might tell the same story?
• Second, look at your billing structure. If you have a tiered hourly rate structure (which you should not), at what level is most of your client activity billing? Is the weighted average toward the lower end of the hourly rate options?
• Third, look at the titles of all the people your clients interact with, and see how many of them are upstream or more on the implementation side.
• Fourth, if a new client has limited time and/or money, what part of the process do you reluctantly compress at their insistence? I’ll bet it’s the analysis and strategy in order to dive into the implementation quicker because they are coming to you more for short-term solutions.
• Fifth, get a cheap digital voice recorder and record just your side of the conversation by setting it on your desk during the phone call. Then listen to it and analyze the type of questions you are asking your clients. Are you guiding them or are you reactively getting the information you’ll need in order to fulfill their implementation requests?
• Sixth, look at where your clients have stepped out of the relationship they already have with you to buy related services. When they do so, are they typically buying upstream or downstream from your firm’s role? Are they spending money on services you think you should be doing for them (if you were positioned appropriately in their minds), or are you glad you don’t have to muck with the stuff they’re giving to someone else?
• Seventh, who have they assigned on the client side to manage the relationship with you? How high up the ladder are they, and do you think you should be working at a higher level within the client organization?

Here’s what this means: when clients have a choice in cuing their positioning for you based on the higher level things you do or the lower level things you do, they are inevitably drawn to the lower things. So with them both lying side by side on the table, their eyes are drawn to the lower level implementation activities and the more strategic ones don’t register like they could.Here’s a simple illustration of that. Suppose it isn’t ordinarily your role to answer the phone, but one day you hear it ringing at the front desk as you walk by, with no one there to answer it, and so you decide to answer the call before it goes to voicemail. What happens if it’s your client on the other end? If this has happened, you know that they’ll crack some joke about you being demoted, couching the surprising (and jarring) positioning message you’ve just sent with humor. They’ve thought of you at a higher level than what you’ve just done (answering the phone), and they aren’t sure how to reconcile the two extremes. Read more

We looked at where branding went wrong in the first installment of this discussion last month. Specifically, branding is no longer a differentiator because most firms claim to do it, because the word is defined too broadly, and because your activities (behind closed doors) are not all that different than what you did before you called it branding. Real differentiation, for yourself or for your clients, requires significantly more pain and permanence than we see currently.

So branding is diluted and ubiquitous, and this is unfortunate because all the claims of those who aren’t really doing it are bringing a hollowness to the few who really are doing it well. The firms who got on the branding bus didn’t really know where it was going, but they wanted to be on it when it arrived. Now that all these buses showed up at the same place and clients assume everyone does branding, the “me too” firms are going to need a new mantra.

That new mantra seems to be sustainability, and unless we think more carefully about this movement than the last one, we’ll continue to suffer the marginalization that accompanies me-too trends.

Concerns about Sustainability

Here are my concerns about sustainability as a marketing tenet, followed by some suggestions about how you might approach sustainability…in a more sustainable way. I care about this and I don’t want to see yet another wasted opportunity as you attempt to get a place at the table, so to speak, where you can have an influential role in your client’s affairs. Marketing-related firms are embracing sustainability, but the context for their beliefs and activities is troubling for multiple reasons.

First, sustainability is being defined too narrowly because it has become a synonym for environmental impact. It’s like applying a single-issue test on a political candidate, ignoring the sum total of what they believe, say, and do. It’s the new litmus test for some of your clients, and now for many of you. Of the many important characteristics that might accurately describe a given company, “greenness” is accorded an unfortunately greater role than those other characteristics that have just as much to do with sustainability (see below). Featuring sustainability has become too much like a sound byte without intellectual rigor. Sustainability is worthy of our attention, but the way it’s being handled is convenient, trite, and simplistic.

Second, sustainability is not generally coming from deeply held beliefs. As it is embraced by a significant portion of your clients and the competing firms in your space, sustainability seems more like something being wrapped around the same realities rather than a foundational belief upon which the entire company is rebuilt. It’s more co-option than assimilation. It’s as if we’re more in love with the idea of sustainability than we are with sustainability itself. The level of hypocrisy is staggering.

Third, some of the companies you are helping are using it largely as a marketing tool. And as one of the primary influencers on their marketplace, you’re an “accessory after the fact,” in the language of Law & Order. As consumers express a preference for products/services from companies that embrace sustainability, some companies are playing the game and telling customers what they want to hear. Every time we help a company lie about their sustainable practices, we undermine true sustainability (theirs and ours).

In spite of all this bad news, the good news here is that we have an opportunity to be relevant and to make a difference. Or we can thoughtlessly get on the bus again, caring more about being on it with the rest of the oblivious gang than knowing where it’s going. Let’s look at how that might happen.

How Sustainability Could be Sustainable

Acting in more sustainable ways is a very good thing indeed, but if we are not authentic (and aligned internally as we pursue it), the brief moments we get on stage will turn open consumers into skeptical critics. Here are some suggestions about having a deeper impact on the world around you.

First, start internally before you preach externally. Assess and then embrace the true cost of following your conscience and lead by example. It’s very popular but entirely too easy to suggest how other people should spend their money. Start with your own.

Second, don’t ignore the broader definition of sustainability. Your carbon footprint matters, but I’m not sure it should matter more than running a genuinely “sustainable” business. That would be one that cares about financial health, management culture, work/life boundaries, doing effective work for clients, and even the sustainability of your own role. Taming chaos today by solving the same problems you fixed yesterday doesn’t ooze sustainability. The best way I could synthesize this point is as follows: control follows viability, and impact follows control. Be the right sort of firm in order to give you the sort of control that can be wielded on behalf of clients that need it (even if they don’t know they need it).

Third, be yourself even if it isn’t all that sexy. Generally ignore what others are doing and craft something that’s real, authentic, and substantive, so much so that you’ll still be energized by it a decade from now. That’s the sort of real differentiation that accompanies genuine branding. If you’ve done it right, the message on your web site can remain virtually unchanged for years and years. That, my friends, is a component of sustainability, and throwing my Venti Latte into the recycling container is more lip service than substance.

It’s time to broaden our perspectives and be more balanced and authentic marketing partners who tell the truth, regardless of where it leads. It’s time to drop flippant uses of the word branding, and it’s time to take a more sustainable approach to sustainability. Seldom have larger businesses embraced a message as significant as this to marketing firms, and whether genuine or not, we have an opportunity to engage in meaningful conversation and move from the transactional work we’ve been doing to the consultative role we’ve longed for. Just keep in mind that good consultants aren’t always popular, but they do have a point of view and they are honest.

Too many firms are like fleas, jumping from one dog to the next as they desperately try to get to the county fair. They so long for relevance that they embrace the message the audience gives them rather than being the expert they could be. Let’s take a leadership position on this and take advantage of a rare opportunity to reverse the marginalization that we have allowed to date.

Next month we’ll look at how you can unbundle implementation from the rest of your service offerings and enhance it in the process.

This monthly article is devoted to business advice to small marketing firms. So when we get to the second part I hope you’ll read the following guidance in a business context and not as guidance about politics or environmental concerns.

What I see happening is another unbalanced pursuit of something that’ll give you traction as “branding” fades and “sustainability” takes center stage. I put both of those in quotes because “branding” has not been practiced with integrity and “sustainability” is about to take the same path. Let’s talk about branding first.

Branding Is Not a Differentiator

Look at web sites for your competitors and you’ll have to search everywhere before you find one that doesn’t trumpet branding as something they specialize in. Branding as a concept has been around for decades, but branding as a word has become ubiquitous in the last decade and it is no longer a differentiator. Even if you are in the minority and really practice branding authentically, the overuse of the term can rob your positioning of the substance you need to “make yourself real” (if I can borrow from the Velveteen Rabbit).
So branding as a concept is more valid than it ever has been, and clients need it more than they ever have, but the word itself is nearly meaningless as a differentiator, for these reasons.

First, everybody does it. Instead of telling your prospects how you’re different from those who don’t practice branding, it merely defines the category: you are a branding firm and now I know what sort of work you do, not how it’s different from all the other firms in the same branding space.

Second, the word is defined so broadly that it always seems to require an asterisk after it. On one end of the spectrum it can be used as another word for identity work. At the other end, it can be used in its purest sense to refer to the sum total of what customers think a product, service, or company stands for. Further, public relations uses the word very differently from design or advertising.

Third, branding describes an activity that’s not significantly different than what you were doing before you called it branding. Are you doing primary research now before formulating a plan for your clients? (Not secondary research, but primary research?) Have you applied branding repeatedly to similar situations to the point where you’ve been able to notice and then articulate very specific principles that help you find the truth quicker the next time you do it? (Are those written down in a document that you could email to me right now?) Have you developed a real process that’s not descriptive but truly prescriptive for your client work? (Do your new employees spend their first full day going over the process so that it really informs the work they are about to do with their new employer, and is that process significantly different than how they did it from the employer they just left?)

Where Branding Went Wrong

This is all historical now, of course, but let me make one other point before explaining how sustainability is the new branding. The point I’d make is that your own positioning got watered down with the advent of mass-produced color printers and PowerPoint presentations about twenty years ago. When those tools became available, firms like yours began to change their positioning based on what they were pitching, shaping the promises based on what the prospect wanted to hear. In the process, nearly every firm became unpositioned with a position du jour in the quest to smother opportunity with interest. It was the big unbranding movement, and we’re still paying for it. You quit being yourself and became something different with each pitch. Your POV looked at things from the client’s perspective and not your own expert one.

As a culture, we came to understand branding as putting a tattoo applique on at tonight’s party so that we could “be somebody” tonight without having to embarrass ourselves by wearing it at work the next day, settling back into our normal persona. That is not branding, folks.

Branding is what you do when you look out across your field and can’t tell the cows apart–when there’s a danger of mixing your cows up with the neighbor farmer’s cows. You reluctantly heat up the poker, wrestle the cow to the ground against their will, and burn a big chunk of the cow’s ass, permanently. Branding is the smell of burning flesh and hair, and it’s not something they sell at Neiman Marcus. It’s the smell of (nearly) permanent, considered choices that are based on truth and reality.

Real branding doesn’t happen without pain, anguish, and a (largely) permanent decision. That’s my perspective, and it’s why I think much of this talk about branding is a crock–we’ve watered the term down and misused it to the point where it now hardly means anything. That’s unfortunate, too, as there are some firms out there doing really, really good work in branding. And even beyond that, your clients deserve better work from you. The world doesn’t need drive-up branding, and by providing it without taking the process seriously, we have undermined the very foundation of our expertise.

How Sustainability is Following the Same Tortured Path

Now fast forward ten years and here we are with sustainability as the new hot term. Are we defining the term largely in environmental terms, or does it have a broader, deeper meaning that might very well reverse some of the marginalization that marketing firms have been suffering? If handled correctly, could we have an opportunity here to be more relevant and make a greater difference in the business lives of our clients? How could an emphasis on sustainability be (ironically) unsustainable? How could we be more honest with prospects…and ourselves?

This is such an interesting time in the intersection of marketing and culture that I hope you’ll stay tuned for next month’s installment.