Maxortunity

by Dionne Aiken

In light of Kim Taylor’s post on how to Be a Good Steward of your Clients’ Money, I’d like to share an example of how we’re taking steps to make sure we continue to meet and exceed our client’s expectations, despite cuts in spending and tighter budgets.

Maxortunity:
This is just a term I came up with (inspired by Ashley Pinder’s post More than Words Can Say ) to put a name to an approach we like to take with our clients.  It is ensuring we’re maximizing the clients’ investment by taking full advantage of opportunities to further push and expand beyond the scope of current projects.

A great example of this is a project we’re doing on behalf of our client, the Florida High Tech Corridor Council.  A project that began by simply hiring a photographer to take photographs of the people behind the Faces of Technology, an ongoing series of profiles published each year in a magazine we direct in partnership with The Maddux Business Report.

We could have stopped there, but instead we turned this into a maxortunity for our client:  During the photoshoot, we also shot video footage of interviews with each individual. Then back at our office, team discussions spawned an idea that brought to light yet another maxortunity, so pushing this a step further, we created a custom YouTube Channel that was fed into the Web site.   Now users from either the Web site or users just browsing related videos on YouTube can view the stories behind the Faces of Technology …  not only that, but they can share and pass on these stories at will.

What we did was open up new modes of access to the information about the Faces of Technology by broadening our perspective and scope of the initial project (the photo shoot) with minimal impact on our client’s wallet.

The key here is that we have to look for these maxortunities and continue to find ways to give our clients more than they expect without breaking the budget.

Be a Good Steward of your Clients’ Money

by Kimberly Taylor

In today’s ROI-driven business world, keeping expenses down is critical to a company’s bottom line. This is especially true when the global economy is in turmoil. Professional services agencies often bear a double burden. First and foremost, we have to provide maximum benefit for the monies clients spend for our services; and second – and less obvious – we have to be good stewards of expenses we incur on a client’s behalf.

It is not uncommon for advertising or public relations agencies to include a markup – often upwards of 18 percent – to cover the cost of items purchased for clients to conduct day-to-day business. And, whether or not the agency enforces a markup policy or simply passes the cost along to the client, the negotiated rate the agency pays its vendors for those services or products translates directly to what the client pays.

For instance, just a few years ago it wasn’t uncommon to pay $.20 per minute for a long distance telephone call. A month of heavy media pitching for a client could result in an enormous telephone bill for the agency and therefore the client. Given the cost is either marked up or “passed through” to the client, why should the agency waste time negotiating a better rate for those services? The answer: because doing so would make the agency a good steward of its clients’ money.

Examples like this are endless and have been demonstrated throughout our agency from operations to design. In fact, our creative team rarely moves forward with a print project without soliciting multiple bids from printers—something done by choice, not necessity. This approach to client service is a win-win for the agency, since we all know they ultimately have to protect their budgets, as well.

Before entering into a professional services contract, consider not only the fees related to the services the agency is providing, but also read the fine print … what will it cost to have 80 boxes shipped overnight to a trade show you’re attending or how about that last-minute set of brochures that need printing?

The bottom line on the bottom line: Make sure the agency is looking out for your best interests.