Big Department Cause Bias
Big Departments
UpStream wants to help make your organization as successful as possible. In order to do this, we want to be your partner. Partnerships imply that each party has a vested interest in success and understands each other.
An analogy that might help is marriage vs. dating. Of course, most people don't get married without dating first. For us, dating means working on a project to see how we work together and if we're a good fit. During this time, we'll get to know you better and you'll find out more about us. But ultimately, we work best in a long-term relationship. Why? We'll be honest, we ask a lot of questions, we want to know more about you, and we really want your business to succeed.
One of the downfalls to just dating is your partner has little ability to provide insightful advice and ideas, because they need to know you more in-depth to give the best information. On the contrary, being married means being part of a team. As such, we will know what your company is like, what it's good at, and where the challenges lie. We can help you identify opportunities from an outside perspective but with inside company knowledge. This allows us to create a more effective marketing strategy with better execution that leads to the results you want.
Why it's a Problem
There are two main problems with these agencies.
- DNA is Hard to Change – If an organization has done something for years it is very difficult to one day send out a memo telling its staff the company they work for now does all these other things they never did before. Even if they added new staff or merged with another firm the bigger part of the organization will naturally down play the new folks and in worst cases reject them. Think of organ donation. Not to mention whatever they did for years they were probably pretty good at it, making it even more difficult to see better and newer ways to accomplish the client’s goals.
- Mouths Need Feeding – How big is your firms staff? What kind of departments do they have? Either consciously or subconsciously agencies will offer solutions that will keep their staff billable. Agencies have a crack web design team…guess what…you need a new website. Now if you know you need a new website, great. But do you need solutions for driving traffic to that site? Do you need to know how your distribution channels can best leverage that new site?