Joel Pinkham

I come from a background of working in the agency side, now in my current role I’ve had the chance to select a new agency for a project. The current company we were working with was a shocker, charging through the roof, pissing around and not knowing the definition of a deadline.

I went out on the hunt for companies through Google, industry bodies and asked for recommendations on LinkedIn. Eventually I ended up seeing 5 companies, which was quite a badly surprising experience with:

• Barely any preparation from some
• Obvious nerves from the people we were meeting
• Absolutely boring – some of them wanked on about things that really weren’t relevant

It got me to realise that I was once someone unprepared, nervous and boring. Glad to be gone from that side of the table I say.

We ended up choosing the smallest company from the bunch, without the blue chip client list and high profile portfolio – but they had “it”. 2 months down the track, they met the tight deadline and hit the budget and now we have myambition.

Key things that made these guys stand out and perform from the other guys was:

• No fat in the company structure – it’s ridiculous when a company of 18 has a CEO, 5 account managers, 3 in the project team with  50% doing any real work. It really costs the customer time to right through the many people
• First point of contact that knew their stuff – Account managers in web agencies are monkeys, they pull in someone with a tiny bit of sales experience who’s willing to accept a piss poor salary and in a multi-choice question would not know what HTML stood for
• No scheduling – We got a dedicated resource for the course of two months, one design, one developer – both with enough experience to handle it on their own. There wasn’t issues of having one week here and there to fit in with a ton of other clients
• Variable priced contract – Corporates love a fixed price contract, but they end up screwing over both parties. The agency puts a buffer in the budget to make sure they make money, expecting clients to make “unreasonable” changes and push out the man hours. What I’ve always seen happen is that, because it’s a fixed price the agency actually has to work harder in the planning phase to make sure everyone knows what they’re getting. It doesn’t work because it is so unflexible. Sure you need planning – and a lot of it but things will always change along the course of a web project, the beauty of the web is how easy to you can change, I don’t know why everyone takes the fixed priced options.

I don’t think I could ever go back to the agency world. Apart from the guys at Known who I’ve been working with, every agency I’ve seen is too small/unexperienced to put out a great website, or too big that it becomes a bigger project than it really is to pay a CEO salary, while the underpaid oompa-loompas on the floor do a rubbish job.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 5th, 2008 at 8:21 am and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.