Agency Governance Part 2: Advisors.

Part 2 of a short series on agency governance. Part 1 — Peer Boards is available if you missed it.

Advisors

This is higher-touch and more personalised. Instead of rotating opinions from a room, you're paying for the experience, judgement, support, and problem solving ability of a single person.

The best advisors understand agencies, the commercial trade-offs, and the unique challenges that come from an industry that has been in a state of flux since….. television?

Why they work

• Context builds over time, so advice gets more specific and less generic.
• Better quality of communication - a good advisor will learn how you like to communicate and how/when to push you
• Clearer accountability. There's usually no ambiguity about who's responsible for what, and a good advisor will regularly follow up with you
• You're paying for judgement and experience - advice probably (hopefully?) comes from a place of deep specific knowledge of your problem

They tend to work best when:

• You're prepared to actually do the work between sessions.
• You're making specific decisions around strategy, structure, pricing, people, or growth.
• You value being challenged one-on-one.

Watch-outs

• You're limited to one perspective so choose carefully.
• In order to scale, it's common for advisors or 'coaches' to force you to change your business to fit their model. That's a massive red flag and a point of real frustration for me.
• Chemistry matters more than people admit.
• If they won't disagree with you, you've just got a 'yes-person' taking your money.
• Not everyone calling themselves an "advisor" (or coach) has actually done the job.

My thoughts

A good advisor can have a massive positive impact on your business - but only if you're open, committed, and willing to be challenged.

There are also a lot of, quite frankly, rubbish 'coaches' out there. Either they haven't done it before, they're narrow in their experience, or they force their clients to change to fit a 'proven' business model that aligns with what will be easiest for them to 'coach' (or sell add-on services to). So be careful who you trust your business with.

This is why Advisory is a core part of what we do at OTTESU - and why the word 'coach' really gives me the ick. I'm a big believer in the value of the right agency matched with the right advisor.

If I don't think that's me, I'll always point people in the right direction (and away from the people I've described above).

Part 3 — Advisory Boards is up next.