Hasta La Creative!

Over the past year I’ve been inundated with calls from consultants available and eager to help our agency soar to unbelievable heights of success. Many of them are advertising veterans with impressive tales of accounts won, agencies transformed and fortunes made. As seductive as these stories might be, I’m skeptical that most of these consultants can deliver on their promise of transformation. There’s much good to be had, but also reason for caution before signing on the dotted line.

I still remember my first engagement with an agency consultant. We had reached one of those agency inflection points at which we were starting to grow and couldn’t get out of our own way. Like a miracle, a letter landed on my desk with an offer too good to be true. The consultant, who claimed to have reorganized and “fixed” one of the biggest agencies in town, was striking out on her own and offering to help young agencies like ours improve our performance, and in general, start acting like adults. She got rave reviews and after a couple of inspiring meetings, we agreed to work on an engagement.

What stands out in my mind is the clipboard, which our consultant carried everywhere and on which she took detailed notes about everything we said. Step one was to interview almost everyone in the agency. I knew we had our problems, but she uncovered problems that I didn’t know existed. For all this effort, at the end of three months I had a new organizational chart and the outline for a team structure that I still don’t understand. None of her recommendations stuck, and we returned to business as usual.

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