Blair Enns is CEO of Win Without Pitching and the author of The Win Without Pitching Manifesto and Pricing Creativity: A Guide to Profit Beyond the Billable Hour. Blair joins the Creative Agency Podcast to talk about both books and strategies creative agencies can use to improve their effectiveness, autonomy, and bottom line.

Get your copy of The Win Without Pitching Manifesto

Get Your Copy of Pricing Creatively: A Guide to Profit Beyond the Billable Hour

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Jared Mirsky is CEO of Wick & Mortar, a branding and marketing agency specializing in the cannabis industry. Jared started out as a freelancer working with local nightclubs on branding and marketing.  He used a combination of Yelp and SEO tactics to grow his client base. His work with nightclubs led to the cannabis industry and legalization became a catalyst for business growth. Jared has used his personal brand, as well as deep insights into the cannabis industry, to put Wick and Mortar center stage. Jared and Wick & Mortar have been featured in publications such as Entrepreneur, Forbes, CNN, Geekwire, The Dieline, HighTimes, and more. Find out how narrowing your focus can take your agency even higher.

Learn more about Jared and his agency:

Entrepreneur Media

https://www.entrepreneur.com/author/jared-mirsky2

https://www.greenentrepreneur.com/author/jared-mirsky2

Huffington Post

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/30/marijuana-marketers_n_3832448.html

CNN Money

https://money.cnn.com/2015/03/09/smallbusiness/marijuana-startups/

The Dieline

https://thedieline.com/blog/2017/6/6/this-seattle-based-design-agency-was-create-specifically-for-the-cannabis-industry

Podcasts

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/branding-cannabis/id1372502413?mt=2

https://www.periodiceffects.com/episodes/e040

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/263-periodic-effects-ca-28688711/episode/e040-rebranding-the-cannabis-industry-29292538/

https://litlucidpodcast.com/episode-22-jared-mirsky/

https://player.fm/series/benjamin-holness/wick-and-mortar

http://stayrootd.com/strong-cannabis-branding-need-know/

Speaker / Instructor Speaking Reel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pO-CqncGr4

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Can you imagine hiring a new employee every month? Bajillion Agency is doing it. Andrea Engstrom president and founder of Bajillion Agency is setting goals and achieving them at a rapid pace. Established in 2015, Bajillion is now a 26 person agency. Andrea goes into detail about how they’ve grown and maintained a vibrant culture. She shares tips on winning new business and hiring new employees. If you want to grow your agency, you’ll want to listen in!

Mentioned on this show:

The Ideal Team Player by Patrick Lencioni: https://www.tablegroup.com/books/ideal-team-player (The interview questions can be found in the Free Tools section of that page).

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In this episode, we explore the benefits of using The Entrepreneurial Operating System to grow your agency. And who better to interview on this subject than Mike Paton (pronounced Payton) the Visionary at EOS Worldwide. Paton has spent most of his life learning from entrepreneurs.  Today, he spends all his time giving back – as an Author, award-winning Speaker, certified EOS Implementer.  Specifically, Paton helps entrepreneurs clarify, simplify and achieve their vision – by mastering the simple concepts and practical tools he’ll be sharing with us today. Paton gives an overview of EOS and how creative agencies can use it to grow their businesses.

Books mentioned in the show:

Start with this:

Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business

Then:

Get A Grip
Rocket Fuel
How to be a Great Boss

Thanks for Listening! Join us on Slack!

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Ryan Watson is the founder of a unique accounting agency, Upsourced Accounting, that focuses on creative agencies.  Ryan discusses pricing strategies, profitability, taxes, and much more. He also explains how his business integrates with agencies and helps agencies through automation and financial strategy. Don’t miss this episode and be sure to stick around for the end where Ryan discusses his top 3 takeaways for agencies looking to up their financial game.

Did you know that some agencies can save 20% on their 2018 taxes? Listen in to learn more.

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Once again we turn the mic on ourselves and talk about our own agency journey. Headquartered in Portland, OR (in an office located in a renovated high school), Murmur Creative is a branding and web agency with big dreams and humble beginnings. 2017 was an exciting, nail-biting adventure in agency growth for us.  It was a tumultuous year, but we made it out the other side stronger and better prepared for the future.

Join the brother’s Bolton as they reveal the trials and tribulations Murmur faced in 2017. Learn if we finally reached our million dollar goal, and listen in to what we have planned for the future.

Are you an agency owner? Join our Slack group.

(Picture courtesy of Chris and Andrew’s mother)

 

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One of the most important things about running successful digital projects is cultivating effective collaborations. Ellen De Vries, Content Strategist at Clearleft and author of Collaborate: Bring people together around digital projects joins us to talk about how you can optimize collaborations at your agency.

Ellen talks about the challenges that groups face on digital projects and how to develop a shared understanding of values and goals in order to alleviate stresses and roadblocks. Ellen shares highlights from her book and offers keen insights from her work at Clearleft.

Be sure to download Ellen’s book for free here.

Also mentioned in this episode: Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers

******

As mentioned in the introduction to the show, we have a new Slack group for agency owners called Grow Your Agency. It’s free. Join here!

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Ann Kaufman is a partner at Fuzzco. She runs their Portland, OR office. Ann cut her teeth in the agency world as an account director and recently put on an event in Portland called Not Not Creative. Not Not Creative featured the voices of account directors and project managers from across the agency spectrum.

Ann talks about the account director role and why it’s important to agencies. She explains the dynamic between project managers and account directors.  She also explores how an account director at an agency needs to put the client’s goals first. Listen in!

Follow Ann on Twitter

Connect Ann on LinkedIn

 

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Brad Flowers is founder of an agency called Bullhorn. Brad and his partners have taken a proactive approach to growing their business by focusing on integrating new systems and using inspiration from a very useful book called Traction by Gino Wickman. Brad also refers to Get a Grip, another book by the same author that inspired him and his team to make some big changes at his agency.

Brad and Chris talk about the challenges of going from creative to entrepreneur and the importance of establishing concrete values that inform your business.

Books mentioned in this podcast:

 

Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business

Get A Grip: How to Get Everything You Want from Your Entrepreneurial Business

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

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Justin Dauer is a designer and author who just published a book called Cultivating a Creative Culture. The book comes from Justin’s experience working at a variety of creative agencies and focuses on the importance of creating a human-centric culture.

Justin has some really amazing tips for onboarding new employees. Some of which we have already begun implementing here at Murmur Creative.

Pick up Cultivating a Creative Culture today on Amazon.

About Justin

Justin Dauer is multi-talented, multi-tattooed, multi-pierced designer, author, and user advocate from Chicago. Through bloodshot tunnel vision, he’s drawn from career experiences across agency side, client side, design studio, and pure tech to foster healthy, dynamic, supportive creative cultures. Crafting as the Vice President of UX & Development for bswift (http://www.bswift.com) by day, his personal creative outlet by night (…and day) is pseudoroom (http://www.pseudoroom.com), the same moniker by which he tweets (http://www.twitter.com/pseudoroom).

 

 

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Julian Leighton started his career as a consultant driving around in an orange bus. The name “Orange Bus” stuck. Julian partnered with Mike Parker to begin building an agency that they would eventually sell. Parker and Leighton grew their agency to over a hundred employees in just ten years. But it wasn’t easy. And it involved a lot of sacrifice and risk.

Parker and Leighton knew that they wanted to eventually sell their agency, and they took many calculated risks to keep the agency growing–often at their own expense.

At one point Orange Bus took out a loan so they could strategically offload the majority of their clients and focus on a select few. This move, as well as others, helped them stay nimble and grow.

Follow Julian on Twitter: @julianleighton

GatherContent is the sponsor of this episode.

GatherContent is a software tool that allows you to easily collaborate with your clients in the content gathering and writing/editing phases of a website project.

You can get a free 30-day free trial if you go to https://gathercontent.com/cap

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