Account Service

So recently as you might have seen or known a couple friends and I have started our own ad agency of sorts. It's more creative collective/virtual agency than full on agency at this point in time. My friend and I who had the idea for it long long ago is a writer. So we knew we needed a person to be our account person. We know that we lack in the ability to make the cold calls to make that first effort to land new business.

So we started our search. We have found the perfect person, but it was not easy.

We had put the word out since we knew there were a ton of account people who were recently laid off and out of work. We had a good amount of responses and interest. We explained to everyone that they weren't interviewing for a job in the traditional sense. What we could offer at this juncture was to offer an even 1/3 of any billings they could bring in. In a great market that would not be enough to entice people. But at that point we had yet to start on an actual client project so since we weren't making money, we certainly would not be paying a salary to someone.

We knew this was not something that everyone would be interested in. Making cold calls, drumming up leads and landing new business. But everyone knew that long before an official sit down and meet. When we did meet with people they were all nice and we again explained things to them. We left it at they could do as much or as little as they wanted. They could make one call to a perspective client a month or 100 everyday, it was up to them. We also told them that unlike most interviews they would be the ones that would need to contact us to let us know if they truly were interested and then we could supply them with the needed materials, email address, etc.

We heard back from no one.

Now if the market was good and we were trying to pry someone away from a paying job to come work for part of what they could land, yes we would seem crazy and would expect no one to want to do that.

But what we were offering people was, while you are unemployed, you can make some phone calls and maybe make a good chunk of money.

Seemed pretty easy to me. For a minimal effort they could supplement their income of their unemployment check and continue to expand their experience and resume to make themselves that much more attractive to a future employer, or be able to come truly work with us if things took off.

It just tells me that most people on the account side of the ad biz are pretty lazy. They want to land a job, be given the rolodex of the client contacts they are being handed, and make a few calls, send some emails and collect their paycheck. They have no interest in growing business or landing new business.

I may be wrong with my assumption. But my experience with most account people in agencies is what has lead me to that belief. And this just sealed the deal just that much more for me.

I wish all of them the best of luck and I hope they find what they are looking for.