VIEWPOINT

7 Keys to Maintaining Quality Creative as You Grow

Avoiding the pitfalls created by agency growth.

When you begin a creative agency, your leadership team is able to touch everything because you’re presumably a smaller shop just getting started. The work comes out great. Clients are happy. Awards are won. Growth soon follows. That’s the dream! 

As bigger accounts flow in, new teams are onboarded. That is generally a great thing for an agency, but if the company isn’t prepared, things can go sideways quickly. The creative directors might have trouble letting go. All the little important details might only exist in a few people’s heads. A bottleneck occurs because all decisions need to go across only a few people’s desks and either growth grinds to a halt or quality suffers. Either way, morale can nosedive.

The goal of the team is that no single person is responsible for the end product; everyone is.

This doesn’t need to be the case. There are clear-cut ways to maintain quality while growing. It’s not easy, but it’s worth the effort. Here are some ways we have kept our quality high while growing substantially over the past 18 years. 

  1. Build teams, not individual talent. When you are building a team, the key is they all support each other and work toward the same goal. Look for people who are strong enough to own their piece, able to put their ego aside, and are always willing to jump in to help wherever needed (and accept help when they need it). The goal of the team is that no single person is responsible for the end product; everyone is.
  2. Clear goals are mandatory. If we don’t know why we’re doing something, there’s no point in even trying. Make sure you ask the right questions up front and that everyone knows what the mission is. Also, make sure the people doing the work are included early and often in conversations rather than getting the information after all decisions are made. The more everyone is invested from the start, the more ownership they all have in the final product — and the faster you’ll get the results you want.
  3. Fight for the team’s rights. Set realistic expectations with clients and communicate your needs. A reasonable schedule and budget are a great start. Setting your team up for success also sets your client up for success. This can be hard when the client is really pushing, and of course there’s always some compromise, but know your limits. If you sacrifice process or compromise timing just to make the clients happy at the start, you run the risk of making them unhappy at the end. 
  4. Pick a path. We decided to focus our agency on digital-based performance creative. This allows us to maintain quality across the board because we don’t take on work that doesn’t play to our strengths. This also has the benefit of ensuring that processes put in place for one client will likely be very similar for the next. At the end of the day, we are doing the things we know we will rock, and we are, indeed, rocking them. 
  5. Supportive leadership matters. Physicist Edwin Land said, “An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.” Our team has developed a fear-free environment. Fear stifles creativity. We just work to get our failures out before they see the light of day. 
  6. Lean on process. Creative professionals don’t alway love a prescribed process, instead craving freedom to explore ideas in their own way. However, developing a strong process is one of the most important steps in being able to create consistently great work when you need to deliver at scale. The ideas of creativity and process may seem incongruent at first glance, but a smoothly running process creates the space for creativity to thrive.  It sets boundaries and structure along with checks and balances, which frees up creatives to do what they do best. Find a process that works for your team, build around it, and keep tweaking it until it works. 
  7. Know your limits. Growth always brings challenges. You have to be patient and grow at a pace that allows the culture and process you’ve created to permeate everything. 

At the end of the day, establishing and maintaining an environment that fosters great creative should always be the goal over growth. As long as that is your north star, the work will excel and growth will follow.

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