Electric and Analog launches initiative for small creative business owners Momentum Mondays
Branding and content agency Electric and Analog has launched a new initiative Momentum Mondays, designed to bring together independent creative business owners together to build strategic partnerships with each other.
The announcement:
Here’s a crazy idea – why don’t we help each other grow our agencies?
The creative industry today looks very different to the creative industry of yesteryear. As clients paying monthly retainers seem to be fewer and farther between, specialist creative agency owners are under constant pressure to build a pipeline of business and keep the lights on. And as creatives who have cut their teeth in the bigger, full service agency groups long for the entrepreneurial life, more people are moving away from being an employee and starting their own gigs. After the ink of your first round of business cards for your brand spanking new agency begins to dry, reality sets in – running a business is hard! It’s lonely, exhausting, isolating and stressful.
As much as 97 percent of all businesses are shutting their doors in Australia. If we take a look at the insights, the stats appear even more daunting. As per the Australian Bureau of Statistics, more than 60 percent of small businesses in Australia stop their operation within the first three years of their startup journey.
Peter Brennan, Founder & Creative Director of independent design studio, Electric And Analog, thinks he has a solution: “We all sit there in our bubbles, working away, trying to take over the world. We know we’re good at what we do, and we build great relationships with our clients, but the reality is, we can’t deliver everything on our own”.
“Take Electric And Analog, for example. We’re a brand, content and design studio. We work with innovative startups, individuals, and internationally recognised brands to solve problems through creative thinking and execution. The thing is, we deliver a rebrand, or make a website, or conceive a game-changing idea, and then the client wants more. They need PR or media buying or search marketing. As a young business owner it’s easy to say “yes” to these things and then try and find freelancers to outsource the work to, but this is a really dangerous strategy”, says Brennan.
“In the first year of running Electric And Analog, we did an exceptional rebrand for a client and built a really great relationship with them. They wanted us to do some PR for them and we saw the dollar signs and naively said “yes”. After all, entrepreneurship is like jumping out of a plane and then figuring out how to build a parachute, right? Wrong. It backfired on us royally as we couldn’t find the right PR partner. We spent heaps of time trying to negotiate with the a few independent PR agencies we’d just found, couldn’t deliver to the client’s expectations, and eventually had to refund them the money. That really hurts a small business in more ways than one, but it’s a lesson learned”.
So Electric And Analog have birthed a new initiative – “Momentum Mondays”.
The goal is to bring small, independent business owners from the creative industry into the same room, once a month, and encourage them to help each other out by building meaningful strategic partnerships with agencies offering complimentary services. How much opportunity does a specialist agency leave on the table once they’ve delivered their core offering? Why not combine specific, realised skills from across agencies to build a bigger and better team?
Brennan says, “The goal of this is to have a group of boutique agencies complimenting each other. This means we help our partner agencies to grow, and they help us to grow. A warm recommendation is far more effective than a cold call. And being open and transparent with our clients means they’ll love us more. No more white-labelling, no more trying to clip the ticket by pushing business someone’s way, just a suite of founder-lead agencies referring specialists in other areas to their clients. In theory, this should result in a happy client and better client-agency relationships”.
The first Momentum Monday takes place on Monday 6th January 2020. Each event will be carefully-curated through invitation to build the most complimentary agency groups possible. Each month, new agencies will be invited to grow the group and host the event.
There’s some ground rules too. Each agency attending has 3 minutes to complete a 5-10 slide speed pitch. This will cover who you are, what you do, relevant case studies, what kind of disciplines you’re looking to find a partner for, and what you’re looking to get help with.
“You have to end with The Ask. What exactly do you need? And how exactly can the group help you? People are busy and I feel the best way to be efficient is to just say what you mean instead of beating around the bush for the sake of politeness. You want something? What is is? Let’s see who can help you get this”, says Brennan.
Based on the principle of helping others, the initiative embraces growth through a sort of mutual philanthropy. As Zig Ziglar says, “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.”
Source: Electric and Analog
