I’ve just celebrated my two year anniversary at Alchemis, a Business Development Agency specialising in the marketing and creative sectors. For me this is a great personal achievement, as anyone who has worked in a sales or new business environment will know that two years in a sales role is practically the equivalent of lawyer … Read More

In the “good old days” before the internet and when you could leave your front door open and nobody would rob you, you might have been forgiven for thinking that large companies with their fancy brands based in Central London wouldn’t ever consider working with a regional agency in somewhere like Bristol, Birmingham or Sheffield. There … Read More

Following my appearance as a speaker at Social Media Week’s event last year on How To Build a £1 Million Agency, I wrote a blog outlining 10 core principles to follow to help you fulfil this. These are simple tips that can be applied to a range of growth objectives for your agency. Specifically they are … Read More

  There have been some rather negative stats of late from the AAR in relation to the decline of new business pitches. Looking at their chart below, you could be forgiven for wailing “We’re all doomed” before retreating into a corner of self-pity and waiting for the world to end. However, our experience so far … Read More

  Reading Andy Jex’s article in Campaign this week really struck a chord with me. The gist of it was that you shouldn’t ignore “the quiet ones” in your agency, given that people in the marketing and advertising industry are often expected to be (or maybe stereotyped) as extroverts. When it comes to sales, the … Read More

  Unless you have been hiding in a cave for the last few months with no access to any kind of media you will realise that, after tomorrow, we will finally have the decision about our future within the EU (or not). Yes, I honestly do grasp the magnitude of the referendum but I just … Read More

  With over 30 years experience at the sharp end of business development, we have seen the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to agencies trying to win new accounts. Here are 5 new business clangers that are best avoided in your quest to pick up new clients. 1.  Over promise to … Read More

  I spend a lot of my working life meeting agencies of all sizes, disciplines, profiles and locations. Before these meetings are arranged, our sales team quite often hear the phrase “We don’t need any help with new business” when making an initial approach to an agency. This is sometimes from an in-house New Business … Read More

I was recently one of three guest speakers at Social Media Week, running a session entitled How to build a £1m agency. Constant Contact, a co sponsor of the event, subsequently asked me to run an extended version of this to their partners, with a focus on helping them build their small marketing businesses. The core … Read More

I saw a great graphic doing the rounds on Facebook yesterday which visualised the different search terms Google’s autofill might select, depending on whether you started your search with ‘how can u…’ or ‘how can an individual…’. Both phrases have the same meaning and yet Google associated the abbreviated ‘u’ with searches for rather unpleasant … Read More