Resources | Articles

Growing Your Company

Ten Tests of Your Positioning

Ask yourself these ten questions to help determine if your agency is properly positioned for business development success... More »

Trends Impacting Employment

While some economic indicators are showing signs of improvement, companies continue to be cautious about hiring, choosing to wait until they see more sustained demand for their products and services... More »

A Plea to Ad Agencies

It's time to stop treating your agency as its most neglected client and promote it to your most important client... More »

• A Dozen Reasons Why Small Can Be Good
• The In-house Advantage - Secrets to Establishing a Successful In-house Design Career
• How to Develop an Effective Social Media Policy?
• Case Studies: Do Yours Win Business?
• Use Downtime to Streamline Workflow
• Why Positioning Fails
• How to get Really Great Creative from Your Smaller Agency
• Balance Your Business for Growth
• A Simple, Powerful Year-end Assessment
• Mistakes that Hamper Growth
• Common Struggles for Creative Companies
• How to Choose a Project Management System
• Why Creativity may not be the Most Important Thing
• Working Smart in a Virtual Age
• What You'll Need to Worry about in the Near Future
• Turn Slow Time Into Go-Time
• Building a Better In-House Creative Team
• Surviving the Tough Times

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Getting Time on Your Side

Tracking Hours is not only for Chargeback Organizations

In-house creative service teams with an hourly chargeback model must track their time—often to the quarter-hour increment. The discipline of time tracking can be off-putting for many teams at first, but the advantages of time tracking can’t be ignored... More »

How to get People to Track their Time

This article offers suggestions on effective timekeeping compliance, and why you should track time in the first place. There are endless details in a good timekeeping policy, but here are some of the basics. More »

Why Track Time, when you Bill What You Quote

"I don't need to track my time because I always bill what I quote". Lots of creative companies feel this way... More »

• Cutting Costs in Your Small Business
• How to get the Most from TimeFox
• Managing to Make a Profit
• Stop Procrastinating and Make more Money
• Reduce Workplace Stress - and Boost Productivity

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Creating Strong Relationships

Bad Clients are Easy to Find

Most creative companies have worked with clients that have morphed into something nasty. How does it happen? Are there clues that the client will be a disaster? Are there clues a client will be a dream? The short answer to both questions is yes. There are definitely clues and if you know what you're looking for, you can see the signs almost from the first contact. More »

What's love got to do with it?

A designer's guide to relationships. Before you get carried away with self-congratulations, remember that the love you feel when you pick up your perfect printed piece is probably the result of some serious relationship work with your printer and your paper rep. And the more you put into those relationships, the better chance you have of opening more packages of perfect printing... More »

Making the Perfect Pitch

New-business presentations are the make-or-break opportunity to win clients, but many creatives lack the skills to deliver great pitches. Three pros identify the pitfalls and share the secrets of winning in the boardroom... More »

• A Call to Arms: Twelve Proclamations of a Win Without Pitching Agency
• Be Your Client's Best Friend
• Building Business by Building Community
• 10 Things to Understand About Prospects
• Creating a Winning Portfolio
• How to Build a Positive Culture at Work
• Culture Shock
• How your Staffing Decisions Impact Your Clients
• Difficult Client? Here's how to Respond.
• Tips for Satisfied Clients
• Working with Your Spouse
• Put Your Funny Bone to Work

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Getting the Numbers Right

What is the Real Cost of Speculative Creative?

Here are five reasons that spec creative is very, very, very expensive for a small creative company. What can you do? How can you get more business and avoid RFPs? It comes down to being an expert and marketing yourself to the prospective clients that would benefit from your expertise... More »

How to Determine Pricing?

Common questions that many creative professionals ask with regards to pricing: How do you determine pricing in your company? When do you raise your rates? What is your target Billable Efficiency, and how do you come up with those numbers? More »

Stop Giving Away Your Time

(Guidelines on how to close the billing efficiency gap)
How much are you giving away to clients because of the omissions and "guesstimates" of time spent on the project? Do you question what can be charged back to the client, write off an hour spent on a project because you like your client or don't want to be seen as a penny pincher? Would you like to stop "subsidizing" clients at a personal expense to your quality of life? More »

• Six steps to pricing your services well
• Agency Check-up:
  • Bill with Markup
  • Results based Compensation
  • Blended Rates
  • Progress Bill
  • Half-Year Check-Up
• Cashflow vs Profitability
• How Professionals Negotiate Price
• Making good Decisions about Capital Purchases
• Get the Most of Pro Bono Work
• How Much is Your Time Worth?
• How to Respond Well to a Downturn
• Rethinking Hourly Rates for Creative Service Firms
• All You Really Need when Times are Tough
• Improving Return on Investment
• Avoid Common Estimating Pitfalls

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Managing for Success

What Are You Building?

Building a dynamic, full-service hybrid agency designed to grow beyond 10, 20 and even 50 employees, requires incredible drive, remarkable patience and an undying belief that you are creating something of great significance. Money cannot be the primary motivator... More »

New Approach to New-Business Development

Ask anyone who runs an agency, especially a boutique agency, and they'll tell you that the most challenging aspect is new-business development... More »

"Earthquake!"

How one FunctionFox customer lived through New Zealand's recent devastating natural disaster. Wendy Riley of Hot Pyjama Productions recounts the terrifying moments of the quake, and gives some tips for being ready before disaster strikes... More »

• The Essential Qualities of a Leader
• Knowledge is Power
• Planning for Succession: Who's Next in Line?
• Are You a Micromanager?
• Micromanagement: Whose Fault is it Anyway?
• Profit-Based Management
• Handling Capacity: When NOT to Hire
• Using your Brand to Retain Top Talent

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Additional Resources

What You Won't Learn in Ad School

There's one thing that everyone in the fields of advertising, marketing, digital media and the like all share: We were all once newbies. Young pups. No matter how we earned our first job or snuck into this industry -- and regardless of previous class work, internships and competitions -- we once had no idea exactly what we were getting ourselves into... More »

7 Essential Do's and Don'ts of Website Navigation

An intuitive, easy to understand navigation is a crucial step towards good website usability. You can have awesome content, but if your visitors don't know how to reach it, your content will also be close to useless... More »

Work Smarter: New Opportunities with Internet Market Research

Ranking highly in search results is extremely effective in ensuring that potential customers will find you at the most opportune time within the buying cycle - when they are ready to learn, compare, and of course, buy! This is critical to any organization with an online presence... More »

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