The holy grail for most agencies is rapid growth - promoting the
agency, pitching for new business, winning new clients and industry
awards.
The PR Week Awards entrants list grows yearly as companies look for more
opportunities to promote themselves.
For the principals, it’s part of the process of building a business that
perhaps one day can be sold for a lump sum, for others in the senior
team it is good CV building experience and may lead towards setting up
their own agency. Even for the juniors in a team, it is a very exciting
experience that hardly any other can live up to for the sheer adrenaline
rush. The thrill as you work into the night, arguing about what should
be recommended.
But what happens to the rest of the business during all this
excitement?
Rapid growth puts huge demands on a team; training programmes, if they
exist, become stretched new staff take time to become familiar with the
principles and practice of the business and people become exhausted with
the pressure of increased workloads and long hours. For short bursts it
is very exciting and motivating for the whole company; everybody wants
to be on the winning team.
But when the excitement of chasing new business leaves the routine of
maintaining existing client portfolios behind, fire-fighting can become
a necessary evil. The ideal scenario of the seniors keeping an eye on
existing business and creating new opportunities disappears. If they
begin chasing executives to get things done a depressing downward spiral
can begin.
The battle becomes trying to hold onto business because the client is
feeling that they are not being serviced well enough, rather than being
impressed by a good job.
However, growth is vital to stay alive. Any business text will tell you
that. If you don’t go for new accounts, the accounts you have nurtured
for months or years will reach the end of their life and if you don’t
have new ones to replace them, the inevitable downsizing occurs. Or
overheads outstrip income and the strain of sleepless nights sets
in.
It is not possible to predict accurately when you need to pitch for new
business, neither do the opportunities come along when you need
them.
Planning for growth in a people business is just plain hard work. In
today’s market it is not possible to put an advertisement in the paper
and recruit a brilliant PR person straight away. They don’t grow on
trees and the industry is doing so well that everybody is looking and
many agencies are offering great opportunities even to mediocre
candidates.
The public relations industry has suffered over the years as advertising
agencies and every other Tom, Dick and Harry had set up a PR division
thinking: ’Press release, media, yeah, I can do that’. The result is
that PR is not held in the high esteem it should be by many marketing
practitioners.
The quest for new business needs to be balanced with good long-term
staff training and succession planning to ensure that the principles and
practice of PR are maintained even as consultancies grow.
Charlene Bargeron is managing director of Greenlines Healthcare
Communications.
