Bringing Balance to Your Creative Services Firm

Bringing Balance to Your Creative Services Firm

Introduction

Whether or not you have articulated it, your firm is mission driven. (Furthermore, what looks “balanced” to you because it aligns with your own interests might appear imbalanced to someone else with different priorities.) In the absence of a clear statement surfacing this focus, how would I discover the unique nature of your firm or the firm where you work?

Until you look for the right clues, answering that question is like scanning a crowd for the tall person when everyone is sitting down. But just like extraordinary height is apparent once you ask everyone to stand up, so too the subtle “drives” at any firm are apparent if you look in the right places. The intent of this is first to help you see where the imbalances are at your firm, and then to suggest a few means of bringing your firm back into balance. All this comes from the belief that intentional imbalance is a lot healthier than unintentional imbalance.

Possible Distortions in Creative Service Firms

After analyzing hundreds of firms in depth and thousands of others in passing, I’ve found that there are predominantly six different “drives” that surface in our industry, listed in no particular order except the last one. The description in parentheses after each ties this drive to a particular activity in our ReCourses Functional Model (see chart on next page).

• Client relationships (Delivering)
• Employee relationships (Directing)
• The Craft Itself (Shaping/Developing)
• New Business (Finding/Closing)
• Quality/Profit (Resourcing)
• Money (none)

Each of the first five must be present to some degree in each firm, but in that mix, which one is predominant at yours? And how would a particular emphasis shape your environment. By the way, when money is the driving force, the original emphasis (one of the other five) has died and all that’s left is money, which eventually destroys the culture. (Please note that money is not the same as profit.)

Benefits of Balance

But why even bother with the notion of balance (or intentional imbalance, if you will)? Well, balance is a zero sum game, and every emphasis (or surplus) in one area creates an orphan (or deficit) in another. So if you are too focused on client relationships, something else is going to suffer (e.g., employees working too hard or insufficient boundaries around your personal life). Or if you are too focused on employee relationships, you may have trouble dealing with difficult employee situations and outsiders will wonder if you’re running an orphanage instead of a marketing firm.

This notion of balance is well articulated, and entire books (like Paul Niven’s Balanced Scorecard) are devoted to it. The point isn’t to make all companies the same but to tie execution to strategic goals by first surfacing those goals and then being intentional about how each arm of the business contributes to their achievement. It’s about letting a firm like yours reflect the principal(s) while maintaining a healthy balance. If a principal is driven by new business development, a lot of great opportunities will present themselves; but if new business is too important, perhaps not enough attention will be given to serving clients well, and they’ll leave. “But of course that’s okay because we can easily replace them,” is how the thinking goes.

Unfortunately, that is not acceptable. See, too much of a good thing (new business) creates distortions and poor performance over a longer period of time. Favoring one of the five drives is fine, but some balance will make the business more sustainable, lest you drift into the sixth drive (money), which means that you’re one step away from the cliff’s edge.

By the way, balance is nothing more than resting tension, which is something that good balance requires.

Determining Your Own Public Dysfunction

So back to how an outsider might determine the particular imbalance at your firm. There are several ways of doing this, and when combined, they are almost infallible.

First, ask employees. One of the 25 questions we ask when examining a firm forces employees to assign a value to these different drives, and then we use filters to make sense of it.

Second, arrange all the titles in a hierarchy and see where the greatest title inflation lies. Is it in account service? Project management? New business? Creative execution? Account planning? Lofty titles are good indicators.

Third, where is the compensation focused? There are benchmarks for how much of a firm’s compensation is devoted to account service, for instance, and if a particular firm exceeds that, chances are that they are driven by client relationships.

Fourth, staffing yields all sorts of clues. If there are no account/client service people by title, chances are you have a design firm driven by the craft itself, where the “Developers” may enjoy pay and title inflation. If there are more people than you would expect in account service, chances are they are trafficking their own jobs and running their own little companies, using everyone else in the company to execute their promises. And that brings us to the most obvious clue of all.

Fifth, who is making the promises? Not who is delivering the promises, but where is the power behind those promises? Are they coming from the sales team, the account team, the resourcing team, etc.? Find out from where the promises emanate and you’ll have your answer to the question of what’s driving a firm.

I have a long list of the things to look for when trying to determine which of those options is the drive at your firm, but that last one (who makes the promises) is the quickest route to the truth.

The Healthiest Firm’s Intentional Imbalance

Finally, if you want to pick a battlefield in this quest to create balance, the best place to start is the tension between Delivering and Resourcing. Similar to how you might calculate the CofG (center of gravity) for an object, the bridge between Delivering and Resourcing is the CofT (center of tension). Figure that out and you’ll be well on your way to creating an organization with the right balance.

Having said that, perfectly balanced forces in a firm like yours is a fool’s errand and there’s no point in wasting your energy trying to achieve it in any precise way. In fact, if all five of the drives are pretty close, evidenced by the right answers in the five suggestions we’ve just gone over, just call it a day. But if your OCD needs a little stroking, let me leave you with a thought. In a perfectly balanced system, Resourcing has slightly more power than anywhere else, and when tempted to make promises in front of a client, Delivering is slightly more afraid of Resourcing than they are of the client.

Here’s part of the list referenced above. Note that not each factor is always present—they simply offer clues to help you see how the firm might be imbalanced.

Finding

• Weak positioning.
• Selling is often “chemistry” or “relationship” based.
• Strong closing skills.
• To free up Finders, Delivering is always separated.
• High compensation and expense account.
• Flashy facility.
• Principal (and others) deeply involved.
• If an airport were run this way, everything visible would make you think this is the most desirable airport in the world. But underneath the fresh paint you’d find leaks, shorts, cracks, and mold.

 Delivering

• Friends with clients.
• Client concentration issue (largest related source represents more than 25% of fee billings).
• Weak Resourcing.
• May or may not have dedicated Resourcers, though any they do typically answer to Delivering.
• Principal deeply involved in Delivering, but other Deliverers more junior in experience who are under close watch of principal.
• Overservicing.
• Underpricing.
• Less effective work as clients dictate solutions.
• After hours calls/pages with eroded personal boundaries.
• Artificial “rush” jobs accepted and done at the expense of Developing.
• Suit vs. creative mentality.
• Segregated, and toward front entrance. If split between floors, they are on lower level.
• Resourcing their own jobs.
• Competing demands placed on Developing by Deliverers who go straight to them, bypassing Resourcing and Shaping.
• No separate Planning because of power concerns Delivering has.
• No separate Finding.
• If an airport were run this way, every strong personality is given their own runway, without coordination, and the gates are first come, first served, with lots of little factions inside and preferential treatment given to the certain airlines.

Resourcing

• Time to put your feet up and think.
• Significantly profitable operation.
• Balanced capacity with few surprises.
• Many more “no” conversations with clients.
• Employees consulted before promises are made.
• Emphasis on quality.
• Appreciative vendors.
• If an airport were run this way, you’d find a control tower, ground control, good communication, and good procedures.

Shaping/Developing

• Enter many award shows that serve peers, not the industry they serve.
• One or more prima donnas on creative staff.
• Principal from creative background.
• Fighting with the client over recommendations.
• Resistance to Delivering as a separate function.
• Maintain a single “high bar” regardless of what client buys—creative output is not on a gradient.
• Resistance to specialization because of niche fears.
• Dismissal of need for sales, believing good work will sell itself.
• Frequent compromise on new business criteria to “build the book.”
• Love for pro bono.
• If an airport were run this way, everyone who has dreamed of flying an airplane gets to drive a tug, taxi an airplane, work the chutes, play with the deicer, have a dog on the ramp, visit other airports, ooh and aah at the newest planes and sentimental antiques and ignore the workhorse 737 models.