Buddy, You Need an Agent

Let’s say you enter the real estate market as a first-time buyer.  The process at first seems to be a matter of identifying your budget and wish list (must: open kitchen; maybe: wood-fired brick oven), getting pre-qualified for a mortgage, looking at listings, pursuing your favorites, making an offer, etc.  As you start, though, you realize that with all this money at stake, so many variables in the process, and nobody interested in getting you the best deal, you could use an advocate on your side — a seasoned hand who can help guide you past serious mistakes, act as a sounding board to your evolving ideas, and help you optimize negotiations with the selling agent.

This is a broker.  The good ones are worth their weight in gold (especially the smaller good ones).  You can get them to clear an enormous amount of brush for you — weeding out the bad listings, giving you a sales history of any property on the market, speaking the secret language of brokers with the other side.  They save you time and ultimately money.

It occurred to us at Helen Marie, after many years of working with clients of all stripes and sizes, that this is desperately needed in the design and interactive industry: a kind of creative broker.  Clients often need to commit large amounts of funding, human capital, and time to a project with an outside agency. Ironically, while this is the stage where they most need expertise, they’re often unaware of, or resistant to, the option to bring in an outside specialist right from the beginning.  We want to change this.

The hardest stage is often defining their needs to the point where they can be reflected in a clear, informative “request for proposal” (RFP).  To get to this point, a business needs to poll its stakeholders, identify their frustrations with the current system (or lack of system), look at its long-term needs, identify a budget, enunciate its brand values, and actually write the thing — and then get it approved.  This can be a full-time job (or several!).

There’s a lot riding on one of these documents.  The clarity with which you communicate your needs will directly affect the quality of the proposals you get back.  We’ve turned down many potential clients in the past because of bad RFPs — the logic being, of course, that if you can’t succinctly tell us what you need and why, then we’ll have a hard time giving you what you need.

Once the RFP is written and approved, the would-be client needs to distribute their shiny new document to the right agencies.  The world of agencies is crowded with similar offerings and slick marketing.  If you’ve never done this before, how do you tell an established, successful firm from one that talks a good game?

For instance, here are two pieces of content that you’ll find on most agency web sites.  Neither will help you determine that agency’s worth to your business.

Past Client List

There are some major clients, blue-chip brands, who occasionally hire incompetent agencies.  Even if the resulting project is a disaster, the agency in question can still legimately list that client on its site.  The big clients never have time to double-check these claims, and you, the unseasoned evaluator, will not be able to vet the association yourself without a massive expenditure of time.

Services List

An agency’s services list can look like an impressive roster of every activity you ever thought you’d need: Logo design! Hosting! Search engine optimization! Content management systems! Information architecture! It might look like a wonderland.  Truth is, though, that each one of these services requires at least one seasoned, communicative, well-managed specialist on the other side in order to be of any worth to you. Too often, the services list is meant to be scanned as a laundry list, not vetted.  The agency knows that its site’s audience includes harried executive assistants, product managers, and not-for-profit executive directors who are desperately trying to find the right agency that fits all their needs.  The temptation is to provide an omnibus list of services so a potential client can glance at the list and think, “Oh, phew — they do everything we need.”

On the other hand, an agency might not list a service if it assumes that service as part of another.  For instance, the agency might be skilled at print design and print pre-production, but may list only “design” among its services.  Or it may assume that database administration and web server optimization are assumed when it says “systems administration”.  It’s hard, and it shouldn’t be your job, to tease out these services when you have better things to do with your life.

Helen Marie is not just interested in shepharding work into our own office.  We’re interested in working with clients to help them through the process of defining and enunciating their needs, and finding the right agency to fulfill those needs.  We can identify where to spend money and where to save it, how to conceive your interactive project in phases to ease funding commitments and provide for more flexibility, how to use the language of the industry in your RFP to maximize the quality of the resulting proposals, and what kinds of agencies to target.  We can save you time and money, and ease the strain on your organization.

Call it what you want — creative broker, strategic design consultant, interactive strategist, you name it.  We thought of “institutional heartbreak avoider”, but it was too dramatic.  We’re sticking with “creative broker” for now.