The best measure of an effective agency (or consultancy, or really any knowledge economy service provider) is of course your results. Did your partner help you achieve your goals (yes!) or even surpass your goals (YES!)?

But as a client you don’t have to wait until an idea or initiative hits the market to start assessing the value of your relationship and critically, how your agency is spending your resources to get that idea to market. In fact, you can conduct periodic “midterm tests” for your agency by starting meetings with three simple questions:
 

• Who is participating in this meeting?

• What are their roles in this meeting?

• What do they need from this meeting to effectively manage their responsibilities in this project?

Sounds simple right? But too often these are difficult questions for people to answer. Too often teams that are assigned to client work are on those teams for reasons other than the needs of the project, the assignments are more about how an agency is staffed. If an agency has planning, creative, production, media, and account people, then chances are your team will be made up of at least one of each of these people, even if there isn’t an explicit need for one or more of those people to be included on your team. If an agency has everything from first-year associates to seasoned executives, the chances are your team will include at least one of each of these people.

These questions will help you ascertain whether your project team was built for your needs or your agency’s needs – and if it’s the latter, they’ve failed the test.

That said if your agency fails this test, it may not be only your agency’s fault – you may also need to look at your own processes. For example: if your Purchasing Department is more concerned about low blended hourly rates than to the overall costs of a project – it’s kind of their fault, because to hit those numbers and still retain senior leadership, your agency needs to load up teams with low cost junior employees.

But in cases where your agency is at fault, there are a couple of consequences:
 

• Kind of obvious, but it needs to be said: you are paying too much for the work that’s being delivered

• Talented people on the agency side often recognize these inefficiencies and strike out on their own to deliver great work without the overhead

The exodus of great talent out of agencies and into the freelance market is a real opportunity for clients to create effective work at a lower cost. But while this has reduced client concerns about paying for overhead they don’t need, it’s also introduced new risk that teams of freelancers working together for first time can do so effectively.

We created altr to help clients get the best of both worlds – delivering teams of freelance talent who have worked effectively together in the past, with individuals deployed only against the specific deliverables where their skills are needed. Before a client works with us, we’ll present a week-by-week schedule identifying who is doing what and what it costs for them to do it.

With this level of upfront transparency and individual responsibility, we’re kind of cheating on our midterms. But if a client does start a meeting by asking about each participant’s role, we’re happy to answer – it means we are right for each other.