It’s not as if everyone sitting round the agency boardroom table has an MBA
3 March, 2009 at 7:56 pm 1 comment
One of my friends is a vet and she was telling me today about the special business skills for vets course she’s taking because “you’d be amazed how many vets end up in charge of large practices without any idea of how to run a business”.
I said that sounded pretty familiar actually. Just because someone is a great copywriter, designer or even account handler it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are equipped with the ability to read a balance sheet or to get their heads around the latest health & safety legislation.
Of course agencies have always relied on back room finance, facilities and HR staff to keep the business running smoothly, but it strikes me that a broad understanding of little things like the difference between net and gross profit is perhaps a bit thin on the ground in some (but not all!!!) agency boardrooms.
Which might explain away a few agency failures over the years…
Entry filed under: agencies. Tags: agencies, business, skills to run an agency.
1. FAO agency MDs – you’re running a business, not an agency « (almost) always thinking | 5 September, 2011 at 2:19 pm
[...] There has been a depressing wave of news of agencies in trouble round my way over the last couple of weeks, which reminded of this post I wrote about how the people who run an agency actually need to know how to run a business. [...]