7 tips for avoiding mistakes at your creative agency

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Mistakes are costly for your agency. To give you perspective, if a mistake costs you 10,000 and your profit is around 5%, you will need more 200,000 in new accounts to cover that mistake.

It not only hurts your profitability, but also harms your relationships with clients, which can bring on even more financial problems. So pay attention to these tips on how to eliminate mistakes and adopt the best practices for your organization:

1. Hire a proofreader – a person that will be focused solely on reviewing the work will alleviate the pressure from others on the team and help your ad agency avoid small but costly mistakes. Every document must be read by more than one person. It is also important to pay attention to images and colors that are part of the material (so do not try and save money by printing black and white copies).
    
2. Make sure that your team assumes responsibilities - Having a sign-off system makes everyone accountable for the work. Employees will be more focused and take extra care with the work to be delivered, thus allowing fewer errors. Every phase of work and every change in ownership should be signed-off. Also ask the client to sign-off as well, allowing responsibility to be shared.
   
   
3. Ask permissions and take proofs during each stage of work - Before going further, assess your current work. Also date your proofs so you have a history of changes and can easily distinguish earlier drafts from the final product. An online proofing software make this process easier and faster, so you do not have to always arrange live meeting to take the next step. 
    
4. Document everything - Do not just say what you want, write it down in a clear and concise fashion. Keep all files organized in one place online so you have easy access and will always be ready to answer questions from clients.
    
5. Control the flow - With so much going on, your agency has to manage task traffic and stay organized so as not to mix things up between different clients, projects or phases. There will be different deliverables and due dates, so also make sure to have everything you need in time and post it to your schedule. A project & traffic management software can help with all that.
    
6. Have a checklist - Along with an instructional guide or brief about your project, a task checklist will help you ensure that you do not forget any details about what you need to complete.
    
7. FINAL STEP - After all tasks are completed, take a moment to review the project as a whole. Check to ensure that everything is connected and makes sense. Asking for the clients to evaluate the project and give their feedback is a good way to have insights on how to improve your standards.

Hopefully these tips can help your creative agency avoid problems and guarantee your client satisfaction. Doing the work right the first time means lower stress and more profits. Please leave your comment and feel free to ask questions!