Open for Business

So you want to hang a shingle and start an ad agency of your own?

Who can blame you? All that glamour. All that creativity. All those eager visionary clients yearning to leverage this new media landscape and change the world with their longer-lasting ink cartridges, their artisinal mayonnaise and their Venetian blind chord detanglers.

These are exciting times indeed.

And as my friend Mark Fenske opines, there's never been a better time to open your shop. The light is green. He's a professor of advertising so he knows what he's talking about.

You may even have the space picked out to hatch your grand scheme. Maybe a tool shed or a converted garage.

You're all set right? Well not exactly.

God may be in the details, but success is in the preparation.

Let's face it, you just can't go out there and start making ads for people and then charge them up the ying yang for ideas that could easily be churned out by a bunch of clever 5th graders. Well…you could. But let's not diss all those game-changing digital boutiques out there.

The point is, if you're going to start an agency it's good to have a library of knowledge at your disposal. Manuals that will help you navigate the unchartered and sometimes unpaid waters that lie ahead.

You've come to the right place:

There you have it.

With any luck your fledging agency will be acquired by a big holding company and you'll be jetting off to Cannes to rub shoulders, and over-inflated biceps, with this guy…