Lawrence Azerrad is an independent graphic designer and art director based in Los Angeles. Azerrad’s studio LAD, has produced work in film, print, and digital media since 2001. Formerly an art director at Warner Bros Records, Azerrad created packaging and imaging for artists such as Elvis Costello, Miles Davis, Clint Eastwood, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Brad Mehldau. As an independent designer, LAD clients include UCLA Live, Renaissance Hollywood Hotel, Wilco, Spa Luce, surf legend Laird Hamilton, The Foo Fighters, Paul McCartney, and Heal the Bay. Azerrad is an instructor of graphic design at Art Center College of Design, has taught at the The Academy of Art University, Graduate School of Graphic Design in San Francisco, and is on the Graphic Design Thesis review committee at California College of the Arts.

You will be responsible for developing a strategic plan, performing all sales related functions and leading your team on a daily basis to deliver exceptional service to our contractors and clients. You will also be responsible for:

• Hiring, training, and motivating the team to deliver excellent customer service
• Developing and implementing effective sales strategies to increase our client base
• Managing a territory and calling on key decision makers within advertising agencies and corporations
• Managing and growing revenue, gross profit and operating profit
• Facilitate meetings with the recruiting and sales team to ensure communication and effectiveness

Requirements

• Minimum 4 years of successful sales/management experience with one of the following: Specialty Staffing Services, Marketing/Media Services, Web based solutions, Advertising or Print, Creative Services
• Successful team leadership with significant revenue growth
• Strong communicator with ability to leverage internal and external relationships
• Understanding of marketing functions and advertising are a must
• BA or BS degree preferred

All resumes can be sent to kmusick@artsquad.com.

View more jobs at: http://texasdesign.com/job-search/

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.

Art Chantry’s work has been collected and exhibited by some of the most prestigious museums and galleries in the world: the Louvre, The Smithsonian, The Library of Congress and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, just to name a few. The Seattle Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art’s P.S.1 have both honored him with one-man retrospectives. In 2001, Chronicle Books published the monograph of his work, Some People Can’t Surf. Art has influenced an entire generation of young graphic designers in the northwest and across the county. To this day, his hard-edge scrappy look can be seen everywhere from punk rock record covers to corporate annual reports.

Date :: Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Reception :: 6 p.m.
Meeting :: 7 p.m.
Location :: Cityplace : 2711 North Haskell Ave., Dallas, TX 75204
Members :: FREE
Non-members :: $20
Students :: $10 (with valid student ID)