When Adding a Specialty, Is It Better to Buy or Build?
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To evolve and stay relevant, agencies need to add new disciplines and skill sets. Yet bringing those disciplines and skills in-house is especially challenging for small-to-mid-size agencies. Do you build organically by hiring one or two key people, or buy a firm and tuck it into your shop?
Business headlines are filled with strategic acquisitions. Tech firms like Yahoo! snap up Tumblr to add critical buzz and attract new eyeballs to their platforms. Banks gobble up their competitors as easily as they accept deposits, to increase their financial and geographic presence. Law firms acquire competitors to add new skill sets and client revenues.
Yet smaller advertising agencies are often left behind when it comes to making acquisitions. In my experience, agency owners are gifted either creatively or in landing and serving clients. But they falter at pulling off successful acquisitions; the x’s and o’s it requires are simply not a strength of most communication pros.
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