Rich Wilson is the CEO of Big Scary Cranium. He is a creative leader with a long history in traditional and interactive advertising agencies. Rich has recently transitioned from a one man shop to a million dollar agency with a bunch of full time employees. Let’s learn how he did this.
Key Take Aways from the Video for the Agency Owner:
- Don’t give up when things get tough. Expect to fail, but learn and move on.
- Don’t think you need to do everything perfect. Focus on what works.
- Make your clients the super star and focus on them, not you.
- Follow up is key in getting new clients.
- Maintain old relationships even when you are busy.
- Don’t fall into the work hole.
- Understand what your ideal customer looks like and stick to that as a strategy.
- Learn how to turn down work and only help the people that you can add value too.
- Most of the time it is more cost effective to bring in a full time employee verses a contractor. Ask yourself this question: Are you the company that wants to keep the knowledge? Your business needs to grow the knowledge overtime
- Are you efficiency based. If your trying to come up with new processes, every time a contractor leaves, that knowledge is lost.
- Don’t hire people just like you. Hire based on culture and similar beliefs.
- Get the right help in the areas that you are not skilled at. Rich uses introspectiveadvantage.com as a resource to see if people are the right fit for the job.
- Don’t give away equity so quickly to get someone to join your team. You should date before you get married. Put together a path to share equity with key team members.
- Look at the next logical step of your skill set and where the market is going and then attack as a business strategy.
- Rich uses Zite which is a mobile app that learns over time what his interests are.