7 Tips For Avoiding Mistakes at Your Creative Agency

Mistakes are costly for your agency. To give you perspective, if a mistake costs you 10,000 and your profit is around 5%, you will need more 200,000 in new accounts to cover that mistake.

It not only hurts your profitability, but also harms your relationships with clients, which can bring on even more financial problems. So pay attention to these tips on how to eliminate mistakes and adopt the best practices for your organization.

Hire a Proofreader

A person that will be focused solely on reviewing the work will alleviate the pressure from others on the team and help your ad agency avoid small but costly mistakes. Every document must be read by more than one person. It is also important to pay attention to images and colors that are part of the material (so do not try and save money by printing black and white copies).

Ensure Your Team Assumes Responsibilities

Having a sign-off system makes everyone accountable for the work. Employees will be more focused and take extra care with the work to be delivered, thus allowing fewer errors. Every phase of work and every change in ownership should be signed-off. Also ask the client to sign off as well, allowing responsibility to be shared.

Be Proof-Perfect

Before going further, assess your current work. Also, date your proofs so you have a history of changes and can easily distinguish earlier drafts from the final product. An online proofing software make this process easier and faster, so you do not have to always arrange live meeting to take the next step.

Document Everything

Do not just say what you want, write it down in a clear and concise fashion. Keep all files organized in one place online so you have easy access and will always be ready to answer questions from clients.

Control the Flow

With so much going on, your agency has to manage task traffic and stay organized so as not to mix things up between different clients, projects or phases. There will be different deliverables and due dates, so also make sure to have everything you need in time and post it to your schedule. A project & traffic management software can help with all that.

Have a Checklist

Along with an instructional guide or brief about your project, a task checklist will help you ensure that you do not forget any details about what you need to complete.

The Final Step

After all tasks are completed, take a moment to review the project as a whole. Check to ensure that everything is connected and makes sense. Asking the clients to evaluate the project and give their feedback is a good way to have insights on how to improve your standards.

Hopefully these tips can help your creative agency avoid problems and guarantee your client satisfaction. Doing the work right the first time means lower stress and more profits.

Chris Wilson

Founder & CEO

Chris started Function Point over 20 years ago in his basement as a way to help professional service agencies run their businesses more efficiently. Since then he’s grown FP into an international success, working with over 600 agencies from around the world and continues to run the company from the head office in Vancouver, Canada.