2Bobs—with David C. Baker and Blair Enns

Blair sees non-standard payment terms as a two-sided issue, where agencies should be creatively leveraging terms more to their own benefit as opposed to just defending themselves against procurement departments who impose onerous terms.

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"Payment Terms, On Your Terms"

While analyzing data from his Total Business Reset surveys, David has noticed five significant trends which principals should be aware of to run their firms more effectively, as well as one thing your team wishes you'd stop doing.

As a follow-up to the discussion in the previous episode, Blair has some criteria for firms that would beneift from prioritizing and codifying an effective referral strategy as a way to gain new business.

"The Best Referral Machine I Have Ever Seen"

In part one of a two-part discussion about developing a business referral strategy, Blair is surprised to hear that David wants to cover how and why we can get better at giving away business, before talking about how to get more referrals.

Blair runs through one of his constraint driven exercises with David by having us imagine running our business with nobody dedicated to the various functions under the banner of new business.

David has observed six common characteristics of agency principals that can affect whether or not their business succeeds.

Even after understanding and trying to adopt the philosophies from Win Without Pitching, Blair sees many creative firms struggling to increase profit because of these six obstacles involving their people and processes.

Mastering the Value Conversation

The Complexities of Commission Culture

Innoficiency in Your Agency

The Enemy Within

The Complex Battle for Margin

Debriefing After a New Business Call

Is Your Firm Addicted to New Business?

Who's Going to Own This?

This is your intervention and David has some tough questions about the important decisions you should be making to manage and grow your creative firm.

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"The Four Types of Employees at Your Firm"

David feels like project managers get a bad rap and has tried to raise their profile within creative firms. So he's gathered a list of traits from the best project managers he's met in the hundreds of agencies he's worked with over the years.

"Understanding Account People"

A lot has changed since Blair wrote his article about seven mistakes he sees creative firms make with CRM years ago, and David wants to know why Excel isn't a good tool for managing sales leads.