Can you believe it’s almost tax day already? Where does the time go? Seriously, though, 2025 is flying by, and the Bureau has been crazy busy. Between preparing a slew of exceptional events for the year and engaging with our brilliant members, there’s just so much going on. I love talking with this remarkable collection of talent dedicated to helping each other achieve success. If you’re not part of the Bureau, we have a chat where people share their wisdom, and I like to dispense some of these pearls in our weekly email newsletter. It’s worth checking out, and you can sign up for it here.
Here’s a recap of what we covered in our March newsletters!
The Eternal Struggle of Client Ownership
Clearly defined roles are a little harder to come by these days, with many shops having people wear a whole haberdashery’s worth of hats. The line between managing accounts and projects has always been a bit blurry, and your clients just want to know who they can talk to about an issue. You don’t have to stick to traditional job titles or roles; you just need to make a decision and ensure that decision is clearly communicated to everyone involved. With that clear understanding, frequent touchpoints help everyone see how things are progressing and allow you to make course corrections. This discussion of roles is worth revisiting every now and then.
The AI Edge
Sometimes AI seems a little scary or overwhelming, but as I’ve been saying for years, it’s just another tool. And like any tool, you just need to know how to use it. As long as there’s a human supervising, these are several really important benefits we’re seeing in AI use:
Efficiency: AI agents can perform rote tasks and data analysis incredibly fast.
Automation: Since AI never needs a break, you can have it do a lot of automation of your to-do list, like scheduling social posts.
Personalization: You can use AI to evaluate customer behavior and help you better tailor your content to improve engagement.
Decision-making: AI helps you make smarter decisions by looking for patterns in data and giving you insights you can act on.
Digital Services Survey
We took a look at the latest happenings in our industry to see where things are headed and where we might have cause for concern. First and foremost, things are starting to stabilize a bit overall for agencies. Smaller shops are recovering the best, while larger orgs are still shrinking just a bit. Revenue was up about 8% for the agencies that upped their rates, contrasted with a 6% drop for the ones that lowered rates. AI continues to be a differentiator, with the adopters getting ahead of the competition, and specialty shops are the ones that are succeeding.
Strong Ops, Strong Shops
It’s the “boring” part of the job, but operations is the foundation on which you build all your success. We looked at a bunch of ways ops helps you run a tight ship. Here are the top 5:
Profitability: Tracking time and establishing clear task lists keeps the money from falling through the cracks.
Morale: People are happier when they have a good understanding of processes and workflows.
Client satisfaction: Clients stop feeling anxious when you provide them with consistent reporting and feedback loops.
Performance tracking: Consistently gathering and analyzing your metrics give you the data you need to make smart decisions.
Incorporating new tech: When ops is running smoothly, you can plan for and integrate new tools without rocking the boat and disrupting things.
That about covers March, but we’ve got so many more insights to share with you in the coming months. I sincerely hope you will find the newsletter useful. We never spam and don’t overcommunicate. Of course you can also check back here next month and I’ll share what we learn in April. Until then!