Below is an excerpt on from an article on SEO Back to basics found at Content Marketing Expert

The History of “Keywords”
Though many may not recall, the first use of “keywords” began in the early days of databasing software, particularly relational databases. Databases are information sources that contain information on sales, contacts, vendors, addresses, medical diagnoses, employee personnel data and any data that required tracking of specific types of information. The first databases had no relational aspect to them. Thus, they were akin to lists without a way to sort information adequately or to focus on a specific type of information contained in the data stored in databases.

Read more here >>

Attracting top talent is hard enough. But keeping it? Next to impossible. The siren song of higher profiles, newer challenges, and greater opportunities will have today’s star hire following her muse out the door tomorrow.
And yet, through decades of building a thriving agency, an amazing client roster, and several dozen feet of trophy shelving, what makes me proudest about The Richards Group is our unheard-of staff loyalty. The creative tenure here sets industry records; our 24 group heads have been here an average of 16 years. Better still? We’ve several young teams with growing profiles who have yet to be poached. And it isn’t for lack of trying.

These are all folks who could work anywhere, who get constant calls from headhunters promising big money, fame, and the moon. So, what do we do that keeps them with us?

Money matters.

Let’s start with the easiest answer: Pay them fairly. The best creatives will tell you they do their jobs for love, not money. Still, when the pay is good? The love is deeper. For our part, we embrace profit sharing and bonuses. Whatever your approach, don’t just tell your partners you value them. Prove it. Good creative is the coin of the agency realm. Good creatives deserve good coin.

Money doesn’t matter. Craft and challenge do.

Yes, this point contradicts the first. Welcome to life with creatives. To keep these contrarians happy, worry less about their bottom line than you do their top priority: staying creative. For my part, I believe that no one should ever work on garbage. It leaves a stench that no amount of money can ever wash off. So we don’t work on garbage here. It isn’t tolerated. Yes, not every job can be a Super Bowl spot or spread ad. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a level of craft and wit to meet. Meet, then be pushed to exceed. I will always expect our work to be the best of its kind. And thus to be rewarded with pride and surprise the real currency of creatives.

I know for a fact that our folks get constant offers to leave for more money. Most choose to stay because they see greater value in raised expectations. So set the bar high, then challenge everyone to soar over it. When the same assignment rolls around for a second, third, or fourth time, let your folks know it’s not “Do it again,” but rather it’s “Can you outdo it?” As long as you walk the walk, they’ll appreciate the push. After all, this is nothing that great creatives don’t already tell themselves.

Give them a say, not just a voice.

Don’t overlook the fact that creatives are problem solvers. If all you ask and expect from them are clever lines and handsome layouts, you’re missing a big opportunity. One of the reasons they communicate so uniquely and cleverly is that they see things differently too. So let them challenge each brief your planners provide. Let them adjust a strategy they find lacking. Let them own a problem; it will help them provide a solution. It will also let them know that they’re not just hired guns in fact, you trust them to call a lot of the shots. That breeds loyalty faster than any pay raise or promotion.

Shake it up.

Another cliché, if you will: Vision and wit are like muscle. They have to be exercised constantly to grow. But and here’s the part too many people overlook they also need to stretch. They need variety. To put it another way: No one denies that Popeye is strong. It’s just that he needs to lay off the forearm curls. To that end, give your team a chance to flex new muscles now and then. At The Richards Group, this is easy, given our 60+ client roster. Our creative groups often swap members or sound an alarm for “outside” help. But even when the need isn’t there, we still push folks to dig for assignments outside their comfort zones. We make it a point to let everyone work on the big-budget “cherry” assignments; we also encourage work on spec for smaller, quirky brands. When every week brings a different challenge, who needs a different job?

One last point: Everyone deserves respect.

I won’t belabor this, because if you don’t get it, you shouldn’t be hiring. Just remember to treat your creatives as you do your clients, your family, and your friends. They’re adults. They want to work. They deserve your trust and respect. Give them rules, yes. But also give them room to surprise you.

Nothing good can happen until you do.

If you stop and think about it, there are two big “finding” tasks that occupy much of your mind as a principal or manager. The first is finding great clients and the second is finding great employees. To find great clients, you need a compelling positioning and a strong marketing plan. Come to think of it, you probably want the same two things to find great employees, too! So start by crafting a place where people want to work, and then employ a mix of referrals and active marketing.

Rather than a long treatise on what it means to build and then lead a staff, let me just throw out a few simple thoughts that I find myself repeating when I’m out in the field working with marketing firms on a weekly basis:

First, if you’re doing the wrong things at your firm, your stealing from the time you should be spending doing the right things. So quit solving the same problems today that you solved yesterday and start looking at the bigger issues like culture and processes.

Second, relearn the source of your own significance. No longer do you need to be in the loop for all those decisions. Nothing screams co-dependent quite as much as hiring terrific people and then guiding their every step. You’re the conductor, silly, and you can’t play every instrument in the orchestra.

Third, don’t worry so much about the “craft” side of staffing. That usually takes care of itself. Concentrate instead on the things that your clients are more likely to notice, including how the services are delivered, the communication, and the organization of the details. Most of your craft people over-deliver to the point where no one even notices the difference–but be ten minutes late for a client meeting and your client will notice for sure.

Fourth, recognize that the two most difficult positions to hire are new business development and whoever sits at the front desk. There are very specific reasons for why this is the case, and they have to do with the personality profile of the average principal.

Fifth, be careful about career paths, especially when portraying one position as a stepping stone to another. The “stepping stone” will always be occupied by people who want to move on, for one thing. For another, the skills required for one don’t often translate well for the next one. A classic example is having people support project management internally and then “move on” to managing client relationships. The innate skills for each are very different, and they each deserve people who crave that role.

Sixth, make sure you separate career paths into management paths and craft paths. People ought to be able to climb a career ladder without managing people, especially if they aren’t any good at it.

Seventh, clues to the management environment follow your best people. If they stay, you’re doing something right. If they leave, you’ve got a problem. (Here’s another way to say this: only the rats who can’t swim stay on a sinking ship.)

Eighth, when you try to fix an underlying management issue by paying people more, you set up a hostage situation for yourself.

Ninth, you can’t motivate people. They’re either self-motivated or they aren’t. You can, however, do things to demotivate them.

Tenth, if you hire the wrong person, don’t make a second mistake by not fixing the first one.

I’ve written down several hundred more from working with 600+ firms over the years, but that’s enough for today. Let me leave you with this one thought on leadership, though.

The essence of leadership is articulating a vision, sharing it with others, making small, daily, consistent decisions to support it, and accepting uncertainty in your role by acting before clarity appears.

Join us in Nashville on Oct 2 for a brand new seminar on Building and Leading a Staff.

So why is that? Is there something inherently unsustainable in the way creative people are working that causes them to have only so many years of contribution before they move on? I still don’t have definitive answers, but here are seven suggestions if you want to beat the odds (particularly if you are the principal of a firm or the manager of an in-house department).

First, shape your own role so that you’re not as central to daily interactions. Specifically, that means not being directly responsible for client relationships, tracking the internal details of workflow, or providing mentoring feedback on individual projects. (We call those Delivering, Resourcing, and Shaping.)

Second, build your positioning and marketing plan to generate a steady stream of exciting opportunities. And then size your firm just under that so that your opportunities always exceed your capacity, giving you the courage to say “no” more often as you get choosier about clients and projects.

Third, size your firm to your own desires and management style. If you let growth happen to you, getting a bigger body count than you should, you’ll keep getting drawn to the “do” side instead of the “manage” side and you’ll start to resent all your management duties. If employees become a necessary evil in meeting your goals, the management experience will be as frustrating for you as it is for them.

Fourth, pay attention to the financial fundamentals of what you’re managing so that there’s a sufficient cash cushion to quell the panic when you’re tempting to make a decision not in your best long-term interest, and so that you personally are paid a lot of money on a predictable basis to keep your interest level high.

Fifth, switch your focus from taking care of clients to taking care of employees, starting with investing as much time in finding the right employees as you do in finding the right clients. If you take care of your people, they’ll take care of your clients, and that’s the only way to make it work, because taking care of your clients is just too big a job for you personally. If you do this right, you’ll find great people to take things over instead of just finding people to help you do all the same things you have been doing.

Sixth, forget about “having fun” as a primary criteria in how you work. Instead, make sure every client brings you money and the opportunity to have an impact on their behalf. If you skip those first two steps and skip straight to the fun, you’re not really building a sustainable business, and the management tension that comes with such an approach will elbow out any fun that you might have otherwise experienced. Build the right foundation and the fun will follow.

Seventh, have a terribly interesting personal life outside of work. That’ll free you up to make work decisions that are smart business decisions (meaning that they allow you to make money and have impact regardless of how much fun you happen to have). That just ensures that the business is healthy, creating less stress for you, while generating enough money to really pursue your hobbies.

Finally, do you look forward to the start of each work week? Really? I love what I do and I hope you get to the point where you enjoy the daily process in an infectious sort of way.

The majority of firms still seems to be holding their own, but there’s a combined nervousness and hesitation about what’s around the corner. Regardless of what the immediate future holds in the short term, you’re better off armed with good information, and that’s what we try to provide in this episode.

Click here to download the podcast directly.

We talked about money last month–this month is about impact.

The Role of Control

How do you get (money and) impact in a client relationship, consistently, month after month? It doesn’t happen without some measure of control in the client relationship. If you’re an order-taker (that’s the opposite end of the spectrum), you’re not an expert, and your recommendations are not considered as seriously as they could be.

So impact doesn’t happen without control, and you know this from your own life outside of work. Unless your physician takes control, he won’t have much impact on your situation. Sure, he will have to listen to you and tailor the treatment to your circumstances, but ultimately he’s got to be the expert or…you’ll just shop for another doctor, who will tell you want you want to hear and be the order taker, whipping out his prescription pad and taking notes as you tell him what you need. This is what your clients often do if they don’t think you’re the expert.

But what control do YOU really have, right? Answering that question for the client is easy: they can fire you. Or they can fire you without firing you by simply refusing to pay, undercutting your role, marginalizing your impact, demanding daily miracles, etc. But overarching each of those passive-aggressive behaviors is the ultimate threat: do what we want or we’ll fire you and replace you with one of the other marketing firms that keeps calling on us.

So that’s easy to see, but what control do you really have? The only real power you have is to withhold your expertise.

That answer is just as simple, but it’s obscured by the fact that the real power behind it is largely absent at most firms, and here’s why: they’re not providing unique expertise in the first place. Instead, their positioning is built on service and the me-too claims nearly every other firm makes. And when your client relationships are built on service, you’re really masking poor positioning.

I can hear you disagreeing in the background, muttering to yourself that “we’re different.” That might be true, so here’s a way to determine if you’re right or in denial. What would happen if you went to a client and in a kind way indicated that you were going to have to resign the account because you didn’t think you were having the impact you had hoped for? In reality you’d be threatening to withhold your expertise, though you wouldn’t have to necessarily use those terms. So what would happen? How long would it take to replace you? You’d like to think that no one could, but tell yourself the truth. Three months later, would they be okay?

Client-Driven vs. Client-Focused

The difference between having control in a client relationship comes down to the difference between being client-driven and client-focused. Client-driven is being an order taker struggling to get an edge, clawing your way back to a seat at the table. Client-focused is being an expert who is doing what’s best for the client (and making a lot of money in the process).

There are all sorts of things you can do with control, too, that improve the sustainability of your own firm. In addition to making more money and having more impact, you can erect higher walls between your work and personal lives, protect your staff from abusive clients, and even do more of the kind of work you’re really proud of.

What do you wish were different in your marketing firm today? Especially since it’s Monday? What would you do with more control? Make a list for yourself and keep it handy.

We had a great time developing a positioning of expertise for 66 firms who attended our 5th Annual New Business Summit a few weeks ago, and we’ll be looking at this subject in much more depth in our upcoming Serving Clients Well seminar on March 31-April 1 Download PDF Brochure. It’s a seminar we hold just once per year on everything your account service people need to know, including what that role really involves, how to deal with difficult clients, how to formalize client relationships, how to price work, how to grow accounts, how to make presentations, and lots more. I hope you can join us.

Why Making Money is Important

You’ll have your own list of why this is important to you personally, but let me suggest a few things.

First, money is the currency of respect, and it’s just not enough for your marketing advice to be good advice. If you don’t also charge ridiculous amounts of money for it, you’re just a replaceable, marginalized commodity without much impact.

Second, it takes money to keep a good business healthy. You can spread it around for employees, equipment, facility, selling your services, retirement, etc.

Third, money is a very useful tool for your own personal use in changing the world. When I come across a client that is already making lots of money, I try to help them see how they could start a foundation to have even greater impact.

Fourth, you’ll eventually go through a healthy transition where you understand that “life” is better chased outside of the business, and money makes that easier.

So if you aren’t satisfied with the financial performance of your firm to date, how would you go about determining the root causes? I want to make some very specific suggestions later, but right now it might be helpful for you to see yourself in the lies that I hear principals tell themselves every day. If you’ll quit holding onto these as excuses for your situation, you’ll probably be more open to the real solutions.

The Lies You Tell Yourself

If you aren’t making money in a small marketing firm, it could be from a combination of reasons. But it’s not primarily because any of these lies are true.

“I need to give away a lot of our time on just one more significant project in order to demonstrate sufficient category expertise or proficiency in a practice area.” Quit already and work with what you have. This is one of these endless excuses for which there should be a Twelve Step program.

“We’re working hard, but our hourly rate is too low and all we need to do is raise it and the money would come pouring in.” An hourly rate is a positioning tool, not a financial one, and if you have a positioning problem, maybe you do need to raise it, but most people who think they need to do that are considering it for the wrong reasons.

“I think there just aren’t enough good clients in our city. It’s too small and a bit unsophisticated.” There may be precious few good prospects in the immediate vicinity, but who cares. Start looking at who needs you the most and forget about where they are. The more local your clients, the less of an expert you are to them.

“Our employees are unusually young and some are even incompetent.” Again, they might be, but it’s quite unlikely. And even if they are, whose fault is that? Employees are generally similar from firm to firm, so look to the management environment instead. What kind of people are you hiring, what are you asking them to do, and how serious are you about having them take leadership roles?

“We aren’t working hard enough. Why is it that I can look around at night and everyone else is gone?” This perspective is nonsense. Hard work never killed anybody, but it never did much good, either. Start doing different things instead of trying to figure out how to do the same things more efficiently. And if nothing else, quit measuring loyalty by how late people stay.

“We serve a unique industry that’s really quite different from the others you might be familiar with. The way it should work is not the way it will work in our niche.” I can tell you that usually this is just an excuse to ignore good management advice, but in the rare cases where it happens to be true, make it work and quit whining, or get into another niche.

Real Reasons You Aren’t Making Money

There’s probably a little bit of truth in each of those lies, but not much. The real reasons you aren’t making the kind of money you should are these:

Your own internal standards for “doing it right” have more influence than what the client will even notice, much less what they are willing to pay for. The work required to meet your own standards is easily covered by what your best clients pay, but your unqualified clients won’t pay what it takes. Your response? Do the same level of work anyway, claiming some deep internal standard that must be obeyed.
You have so little power in client relationships that you are knowingly underestimating the costs of doing the work because you don’t think the marketplace will accept the true cost and you’re secretly terrified that they’ll just hire the next firm in line.
You think you’re in a service business when in fact you’re really in the expertise business. You haven’t fully grasped that the real power you have in client relationships is withholding your expertise from a critical client issue. So you mask your poor positioning with extraordinary customer service.
You’re letting client longevity cloud client profitability, thinking that there’s some moral obligation to keep over-servicing favorite clients who in reality you have outgrown through the additional expertise you’ve developed.
Your positioning is largely interchangeable with the other tens of thousands of firms out there.
You’re utilization rate is low, perhaps hovering around the national average of 42% of all the time worked in the firm (billable and unbillable), but you aren’t aware of the extent of that issue since pretty much everyone is working hard and it’s difficult to fathom the possibility of actually giving away that much time (and money).
You keep solving client issues instead of employee issues. At a certain size, the only way to make your firm work is if you take care of employees and they take care of clients. Otherwise they’re just helpers and your firm will never rise to what it could be.

Finally

If you’re making money, you’ve probably got these things figured out and as a result you probably have a more sustainable firm. Otherwise, don’t lie to yourself. The cold, hard truth will set you free.