

How to Start an Advertising Company - keltecp11
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090701/so-you-want-to-start-an-advertising-company.html?dsq=13355020#comment-13355020

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pxlpshr
I ran my own mini-advertising agency during college. They don't take much to
start and ended up with a very, very nice salary (middle $100's). I even lived
for free for two years exchanging services with collegiate complexes in the
area. Here's what I concluded:

1\. Top-notch creative counts for big accounts, but not necessarily local
(local small businesses micro-manage)

2\. Great Account Service (people want honesty and good work ethic, bullshit
excuses are transparent — you'd be surprised how many designers/freelancers
don't get this)

3\. Automate Remedial Tasks (don't waste hours on proposals, revision orders,
etc. most of them are the same anyway). The ad agency I left to start my own
spent ~$100K+ a year on employees to do this crap. Waste.

I was learning PHP/SQL at the time so I built my own extranet for the
business. Wrote a script to generate 6+ page proposals in a matter of minutes.
And had a backend system built so I could simply upload images to the FTP and
it would categorized and auto-thumbnail for the clients to preview, etc.

Due to the demands of college, I usually contracted initial concepts to
freelance designers and then handled most of the revisions, etc. This kept me
mentally sane as the initial conceptual process is usually the most draining.
When I closed it all down after ~3 years to chase a dream in a video game
startup, I had utilized about 20 contractors from all over the world during
that period.

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mahmud
Inspiring article. Not really a "HOWTO", but the story of an advertising
startup; launched 1999, profitable in 2 years, 450k split 7-ways in annual
Manhattan salary, etc. Short OK read.

