Funday

Summer is here... get your Zombod in shape! Great working with Sandbox VR on a wicked campaign. Funday https://lnkd.in/gg9g7iEV

Like many executives in leadership positions I have always kept busy. But it wasn’t until the last 4 months or so, since I joined independent (and awesome) agency Funday that I realized how much time I spent in my past jobs being busy, but not actually being productive.  It wasn’t for lack of effort, enthusiasm, or focus. It was for a reason that I really couldn’t put my finger on until now.  You see, when you’re in the thick of it in large companies (and publicly traded ones), you don’t realize how much of your time and energy is spent rationalizing… everything! So many hours spent meeting about meetings because “so and so is coming to town and we need to be prepared for what might happen…" or "we have to review process X because it’s important to person Y, who is important to client Z…” or “we’re not optimizing our teams, so let’s review everyone’s utilization levels to ensure we’re being efficient…" sheesh. All of these discussions, decks, decisions, were important in the moment and made sense at the time, but in retrospect, a lot of it was just NOISE. Loud, distracting, and (at times) politically motivated noise. My focus group of 1 would suggest the job I am doing today – my actual function – is the exact same as it has been for over a decade leading agencies. But suddenly I have more time to be productive on my hands. Why? Because as I have learned, in a remote, entrepreneurial environment there is no time, room, or desire for that corporate noise.  Don’t get me wrong, we still have meetings. But the meetings are for a purpose, and when that purpose is achieved, we move on. We don’t need to sit around and rationalize why we’re there, or make sure everyone says something to justify their attendance. There are meetings where I literally come on camera say hi, and am there to listen for 10 minutes and move forward on the actual task.  It is amazing how much more time and space you can have to do your actual job when you remove the noise.  My job at Funday is to help develop the business. In other words, lead and grow the agency. That clarity is a gift. A much less noisy gift where the focus is on our clients, team, and the work product. So, as I reflect on the last few months, and look out the window at another beautiful morning, I wish you all a noiseless summer... full of real focus, fun, and good fortune. 👊

Guess what!? We're hiring, we've got a senior strategist role available. Reach out if you're interested or have any questions!

Apparently we're not supposed to post more than once a day. Well, we're challenging the status quo here at Funday! But don't take our word for it, ask LBBonline - Little Black Book. Thx to all the Funatics, clients, friends, supporters and fellow Indies out there, trying to make a dent in the universe.

We've been busy! Kudos to the Funday team and our amazing new client partners. And thx LBBonline - Little Black Book for the shoutout. https://lnkd.in/g9fJgt3s

Full-service branding and advertising agency Funday today announces a slew of new business.

Making the right choice isn’t necessarily the easy one. Thanks LBBonline - Little Black Book and kudos to my fellow business leaders (written about here) who are making similar calls, daily. https://lnkd.in/eNhnMVhZ

A principle isn’t a principle until it costs the principals. We recently had to let a client go. Never want to do that again – not fun.  Especially because it’s on us. After all, why should we expect any organization to adapt the way they work for us. If anything, we should adapt to our clients… and to a point, we do. But ultimately our clients choose us for us, and we choose them for them. Warts and all. Experience tells us that most partnership challenges can be solved, but not when it comes to issues around culture. Culture can be a nebulous concept – it’s a feeling, based on the alchemy of a company’s values, principles and beliefs. At Funday we believe in partnership not vendorship, in our passion bearing fruit, in performance actually mattering, and of course in the value of play and (wait for it) fun! That alchemy bears itself out in the way we support each other, support the work, support our clients, and like most things in our world it ladders up to the concept of being “on-brand”.  We know that great brands deliver a specific experience for their users/audience/customers across every interaction. Being on-brand is tied into that consistent feeling, the takeaway someone has with the company. The same holds true for an agency brand like ours. We give a lot of thought to the specific experience we want our clients to have and how we want them to feel about us. Saying goodbye to that client was inevitable, the remit was just off-brand for us. It happens. People change, expectations change, divorces occur. Both parties will be better for it. In the short term, this choice definitely hurts our bottom line. But being off-brand would mean we’re acting as professional hypocrites, not practicing what we preach, and that will end up costing us so much more in the long run. 👊

It takes three to make a thing go right. At Funday we offer clients “big agency talent with boutique vibes”. As a 50’ish person team of entrepreneurial marketing services practitioners, we tap our individual networks to tell the company story and promote our ethos around the house that fun built (and continue to build) for great brands across North America. In order to keep growing, however, we need to meet new potential clients and we owe it to the team to look beyond our own rolodexes. At latest count there are somewhere close to 150,000 agencies in North America. (Not sure what constitutes an agency these days, but clearly the barrier to entry is low.) While it should be easy enough for a marketer to find an agency that fits their needs, the sheer volume of potential partners makes it challenging. Especially in the US where 2/3rds of our clients reside. Enter the ever-important consultant, matchmaker, agent, referrer, connector — a person whose job is to connect brands with potential agency partners. The connectors we work with are great. They get what Funday is all about and ultimately ensure that the brands they’re speaking to on our behalf have needs we can fulfill. I met a potential connector last week whose motivations were a little different in this respect. He told me he got into the connections business for the LOVE of connecting great people, implying he didn’t have to do this work, but wanted to, to the point where he said: “When I’m dead I just hope they’ll say I helped connect them…” It got me thinking about the power of connecting people. Sometimes because it’s your job... and sometimes just because you can. If you find yourself in the latter territory, please consider that there are a lot of talented marketing professionals who have recently found themselves on the sidelines trying to get back onto the field of play. The unfortunate reality is that many of these folks are in the second half of their careers and are running into walls when all they need is a door opened. The magic unlock may come from the connection key you possess. Perhaps naive, but if we all just connected one person this week to another in our respective networks it would do a world of good. Do it selflessly or do it for the quid pro quo of it all all, but no matter your rationale, the ROI is clear since all it takes is a couple clicks, and a couple seconds... It’s amazingly profitable to connect people and do what you can to better their lives. 👊