Bospar was a New Year’s baby. So, it’s fitting that we have a tradition of taking two days in December for our entire staff of Bospartans to go off site together to strategize an even stronger year to come. Since we’re based in every U.S. time zone, this means lots of flights, hotel rooms and late nights at the bars.
Our slogan is “Turn on the Power” – and this time together gives us the opportunity to boost the power within ourselves in order to make our clients more powerful than ever before.
2016 was, indeed, a powerful year for our clients, and we’d like to think we played a part in their success. And that, in turn, made it an excellent year for us. We added some key people to join our talented and loyal staff – we’re proud to say that we had 100% retention in 2016. We also added new media, research and workflow tools that we’re still, in some cases, learning how to fully deploy. We got smarter about how to mix social media acumen with our traditional media strengths. We built a significant social following for ourselves, which we put to work on behalf of our clients. And we found time to “give back” through several pro bono activities.
One theme of our offsite was the fact that time continues to become ever more scarce among the two masters we serve – our clients and the media. We brainstormed a number of ways to increase our efficiency and effectiveness, to give both sides more help, with shorter turnaround times.
At the top of our list of efficiency and effectiveness builders is a simple statement – “take time to think.” We are consultants first and foremost, and we are hired not for just any execution – but for exactly the right results-producing decisions at each step of the way. No client or media contact deserves anything less than that.
Time-to-think disciplines that we resolved to take to new levels in 2017 include:
- Help our client contacts get all the information needed from within their companies for us to strategize the best approach – before we write that first press release or bylined article draft
- Refine our internal client heat map to more systematically put our knowledge of all client spaces and contacts to work for each specific one
- Hold more impromptu brainstorms
- Add a “what if” section to our weekly client meeting agendas
- Be religious about conducting our internal quarterly “client spotlights,” where the rule is to spend an hour fully dedicated to the best strategy and creativity to inject into each client’s upcoming quarterly plan
May everyone achieve their most valued New Year’s resolutions, to Turn on the Power for a happy and prosperous 2017!
