At Navigation Advertising, we get the opportunity to meet and often work with lots of different clients from various industries. There are a few consistent complaints that we hear from prospective clients about their past experiences with agencies and designers — timeliness, that is meeting deadlines and turn around time on deliverables. Unfortunately, the design/advertising/marketing/pr industry has developed an unwelcome reputation of always being late and over budget. So often, the reason a project or campaign doesn’t get delivered on time is because an agency lacks the capacity (not necessarily the capability) to get the project or campaign done on time. There are many possibilities but the one we’ve encountered the most is when an agency outsources their work to freelancers. Due to the nature of their workflow, most freelancers take on more work than they can handle because they never know if more work will be coming to them. Feast or famine. Therefore, they often miss deadlines because there are just so many hours in a day. Their delays flow down to the agency and then to the client.
When I was in college, I worked in residential construction for a couple of summers. I noticed that the subcontracting framers I worked for were often running behind on getting the job done and the reason was most often a lack of workers. They would try to get by with fewer workers than what was needed in order to make more profit, but they would often cause the project to be delayed. Thus, pushing other aspects of the build behind too and costing either the homeowner more or the general contractor to lose money. At Navigation we’ve always tried to be fully staffed so that we can not just get our current clients’ projects done on time, but also be able to take on individual projects or new clients without causing unnecessary delays in meeting deadlines. We pride ourselves in meeting deadlines, staying within budget and producing high quality work. No one bats a 1000, but we believe our batting average is way above industry standards because we really do care about keeping our promises and impressing our clients. All of our professionals are degreed, have multiple years of successful practice or both in their respective specialties. Resourcefulness, flexibility, priority setting, good communication skills, and the actual ability to pull off the task are the characteristics we demand from all of our employees. We make each other better and that as a whole makes our advertising agency better at every level.
The renowned businessman Harvey Mackay once said, “Deadlines aren’t bad. They help you organize your time. They help you set priorities. They make you get going when you might not feel like it.”
We always tell interns and employees that we are in a deadline driven business and it’s our job to know how long a job will take, back date the project according to the clients’ deadline needs and then shuffle projects based on our ability to get certain tasks done and their priority. Otherwise, we’d be a jumbled mess of missed deadlines and unhappy clients. Hopefully being in business for 22 years is proof that we are good at what we do and our clients are the beneficiaries of our planning and diligence.
If you’ve been burned by missed deadlines or poor results from a designer or agency, please contact us —we’re confident we can exceed your expectations and hopefully redeem the reputation of our industry — one campaign or project at a time.
Christian Hidalgo