Marek Lis
Owner/Founder at Alchemy Insights
Website Address: www.alchemyinsights.com
Tell us a little bit about what Alchemy Insights does around the country to help clients be more efficient.
Well I jokingly say that I’m in the waste removal business because waste equals loss of revenue. And what I do is I mainly help agencies eliminate the waste in the human collaborations. And most importantly, I help to eliminate the waste around the client collaborations.
Six Sigma, for those that don’t know, is how to cost save, make things more efficiently, to help them approach their clients and make sure that they are being the most efficient they can for the dollars that are being spent, is that correct?
That is correct, yes. So if you could imagine applying Six Sigma to human collaborations. So Six Sigma is easy when it comes to process manufacturing, those sorts of environments. But when it comes to human collaborations where people don’t necessarily say what they mean or do what they say, there’s a lot of spoken and unspoken dialogues that happen particularly in agencies. So how many times have you been sitting in the room and you see all of the heads nodding in agreement around the table only to find that everybody sort of goes up and does their own thing once once the meeting is finished? And how many times have agencies sat across the lunch table from their clients and asked how things are going and the clients have said, “yep everything’s fine, everything’s just dandy. You can make some improvements here and there but everything’s just great.” And next thing you know they put the business up for pitch and you’ve lost a client. So the interesting aspect of my business is applying that Six Sigma thinking to the dynamics of human endeavors, especially the creative business.
How does somebody realize that they need you? How does that approach happen?
A bit of honest self reflection. Most agencies are pretty confident that they are the best in the business at what they do, and most agencies think that they have a pretty good grasp on their client relationships. However if you look at on a macro level, like the Wall Street Journal did a survey not so long ago and uncovered that over 50 percent of brands are looking to change the rating season in the next 12 months. So you have that disparity between where the agencies feel that they are and where the clients are saying that they are. So that’s on a macro level. If the agency also looks at things like rework, rework in my mind is really the tip of the iceberg as far as where the efficiencies or inefficiencies are in the system. So lots of rework leads to frustrations leads to loss of revenue unless you’re working in the head hours farm like a lot of holding company agencies, but most independent agencies don’t have that business model. So you’ve got all these disparities that are happening and you apply some honest self reflection. You can realize that there’s changes to be made there, and then on top of that, there’s some discipline ways of actually being able to measure and identify or identify and then to measure where those disparities are happening and the extent of those disparities and the dollar value of those disparities and then what you can actually do about them.
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