These last years have created a lot of uncertainty in businesses, especially in the field of counseling and advertising. Clients tend to lower budgets and reduce their investments on ads, marketing and web. Every agency’s manager has to face some issues that may lead to a potential loss of profits, or in the worst case, the breakdown of their agencies.

We came across an interesting post: Nine Rules for Rebooting Your Business – BusinessWeek, written by Jill J. Morin, and we thought that a good exercise was to reduce them to three for a faster and immediate use, especially dedicated to creative minds (as we are).

Let’s reveal our 3 rules on rebooting!

1. Be ready for change.
You think you’re creative, ah? Well, creativity means having ideas and knowing how to put them in action. Brute-force some established rules within your organization and be ready to move forward, changing what, honestly, is outdated or existing only because you and your team are used to. Do not aspire. To paraphrase some of Scott Belsky’s theories presented in his book, Making ideas happen, do everything to build and rebuild your assets, every time there’s something that doesn’t move forward and holds your potential (being a business, a new product, an idea) to grow.

2. Focus and share
We aren’t superhereos, aren’t we? No. The idea of being the God and the Devil of your agency, the only one that understands what’s happening is outdated (and dangerous). Choose what’s your best attitude and stick to it. Learn to share and involve other people of your team and allow them to help you on daily challenges. Being sincere and honest about your challenges does not imply that you can’t be a boss or the lead voice within your organization! When you distribute tasks and know how to share, you will have more time to focus on your tasks, being it following new clients or prospects or managing the next big project.

3. Develop a routine
Allright: life is a mess! Your agency turnover too… So what? You can’t control every single aspect of your life, nor what’s happening in your organization. When I was single and living by myself I established some simple rules to deal with cleaning, washing, ironing, cooking and so on. No written rules, simply trying to stick to the hours and force to have a timetable. At the beginning was horrible, but after a while I used to develop a routine and that worked. After a few months I was able to deal with the University, cook some delicious meals, watch TV. I think the same mechanism works for your business. Develop a routine (or more) and you’ll benefit in the medium, long term.

Hope it will help!

Here’s Morin’s article on her 9 rules.