3 Roles for Agency Employees

A common misconception about agency employees is that they spend all of their time meeting with and helping clients. In fact, client service is just one of an agency staffer’s three jobs. The other two are business development and agency administration. Different firms might use other terminology to describe these three roles, but a PR agency can’t exist for very long unless its people pay attention to all three.

Client service

Meeting or surpassing client expectations is job-one at a PR agency. If a staffer can’t manage client expectations and deliver their desired results, he or she risks having an unhappy client. And that’s not good for business.

To provide the best client service, agency staffers need to bring all of their public relations skills to bear — along with the ability to sell their ideas and maintain strong relationships with their client contacts. These are the basics.

Depending on the firm’s utilization targets, a PR-agency staffer could be expected to spend 70–90 percent of a 40-hour workweek on billable client service. That doesn’t leave much time for the other two jobs, which is why the agency business has a reputation for requiring its staffers to work long hours.

Business development

Client assignments come and go, along with the associated revenue. So it’s crucial that a PR firm keep its pipeline of new business open and flowing. To do that, its staffers must constantly be prospecting and networking, and generating visibility for themselves and the agency.

Agency staffers need to spend time responding to requests for proposals and developing their own proposals for specific business leads. All of these responsibilities add to nonbillable investments of time for existing client relationships, such as meeting clients “off the clock” for lunch or dinner, or other bonding activities.

Administration

A PR-agency staffer’s third job is administration, the oft-forgotten stepchild of the agency business. If agency staffers don’t pay attention to the many arts of business administration, whatever profit the business generates can easily be lost to factors such as poor cash flow, high operating expenses and poorly negotiated contracts with vendors, to name a few.

The job of administration tends to be overlooked for many reasons, the most common of which is that staffers didn’t join the PR professionals to process vendor bills, time sheets and account-utilization spreadsheets. Many PR pros are “right brain” types, so their creative impulses tend to dominate their thinking and how they choose to spend their time. Since these folks often have a natural distaste for “left brain” activities such as math, sequencing and accounting, they tend to put their account-management responsibilities on the back burner.

People-management activities are another big part of agency administration. Mentoring, advising, counseling and training young staffers takes time, most of which is not billable. And those are the enjoyable parts. As you rise through the agency ranks you might also have to spend time addressing problem employees and workplace conflicts.

If you’ve never worked in a PR agency, you would be partially correct to think that agency staffers spend all of their time catering to client needs. They might devote 40 hours or more per week to thinking of clients, but the rest of the time they’re working to bring in new business and make sure their organization remains well positioned to provide the best client service it can.

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