retirement

Is There Life After Advertising?

Peter · December 22, 2015 · 2 Comments

Is There Life After Advertising? Yes.

FYI: This was originally written in 2015. As of July 2016, I now live in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. This is one of North America’s coolest towns and I can still run my ad agency consultation business c/o the sweet waves of Wi-Fi.

December 22, 2015. Sayulita, Mexico.

This is a personal story.

I’ve been asked about life after advertising by many of my clients. And, why not. Advertising owners (my case) wonder if and how they can sell their agency and then wonder ‘what’s next?’

Ad workers see that they will probably age out of the industry by their late forties (a fucking huge problem for our industry’s brain drain that is exacerbated by the absurd notion that it’s a young person’s industry. However the BIG fact is that the margins are so slim that agencies can’t afford to pay their older employees decent salaries and associated benefits).

In other cases, people just get fried crisp or get fired and want out.

In the interest of speed, here are my two lives after advertising. If you have a few more minutes, check out my It’s Me page to read a bit more about my global and local advertising and client side Internet experience.

Life After One – From Saatchi to Internet

1995 – 2001. I left Saatchi in 1995 to work for Advance Internet, a division of The Newhouse’s Advance Publications. I was an early CEO in the reinvention of online news. I then went on to found and run ActiveBuddy. You might have played with our SmarterChild natural language bot / app.

Life After Two – From Owning Citrus to Peter Levitan & Co.

2001 – today. After SmarterChild (a long story) and 9/11 (I was fairly close to ground zero), my wife and I decided that we’d move to Oregon (Bend and Portland) after I bought the ad agency Citrus. I ran that for 8 years. I enjoyed selling it. The experience reminded e of selling my sailboat. The two best days were the day I bought it and the day I sold it.

I started this advertising agency business consultancy after I sold my agency and was asked by a couple of friends to help them craft a new business program. Citrus had done quite well. I’ve been applying my Saatchi and Citrus knowledge to help dozens of agencies build growth strategies during the past four years.

OK. What’s The Point?

I took my skills and founded a consultancy. I’m not unique. But, people love it when I tell that I can work from any part of the world (thank you WIFI and Skype). I kinda lucked into this new career, but I recommend that you do some planning because… you will have a life after advertising.

Here are some links that might deliver food for thought and guidance.

Smart Passive Income: Check out the guru on the idea of earning passive income. Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income is a simply brilliant how to start a live-anywhere make real-money business. He made $108,000 last month! Online! In his jammies! Ok, not that easy but… read him.

Grow Supply: Ali Mese tells you how to succeed and if you go right here you can get links to many many free tools and websites that will help you build your new business.

How To Sell Your Ad Agency: A link to my blog posts on selling your agency.

The Bottom Line?

Take my Corleone Offer and call me up. It’s an offer you should not refuse and a faster path to —– how to make the cash to get to What’s Next.

Sell Your Advertising Agency or Just Leave

Peter · November 3, 2015 · Leave a Comment

Leave Advertising

I just got off the phone with an account director at a humongous WPP agency that was telling me about his six years in the advertising business and his current ‘woe is me story’ (I love this definition: “ironical or humorous exclamation of sorrow or distress.”) My advice? Hey, many architects, dentists, dry cleaners and, yes, even lawyers get very antsy at the six-year mark, so consider taking a year off and go to SE Asia. He’s 30 and single so just do it.

Exit Strategies

The conversation got me thinking about exit strategies. We are well past the days when people hung in there to get a gold watch for 50 years of dedicated work and people age out of advertising at 43 these days (high salaries? don’t know how to market to millennials? haven’t figured out that Periscope is so much more effective than Tv advertising?) So, if you want… go to the greener pastures. They are out there and some come with great food… see the video below.

If you are a fed up owner or partner – sell out. Believe me, there is life after agency ownership. And, really, one of the smarter worst case scenarios is to know NOW that you want to sell SOMEDAY and that you should start to position your agency TODAY for an eventual sale. Have you started to do this? Like: Start to imagine that you are a potential buyer. Would you be interested in your agency? I’ve written about the art of selling on this blog and on LinkedIn. By the way, some owners just walk away. Selling a service business – especially a full-service agency – with fickle clients isn’t that easy.
Unhappy in your first few years? Quit your job and travel. OK, a tough call. But, if you are young, you are going to have at least ten jobs anyway. So, why not make one of those ‘jobs’ be a year playing in Thailand? If that sounds too radical, make sure that your personal brand and story is in order. Your brand will lead you to your next gig.

Need some help getting to Thailand? Like spice? Watch this crazy video.

Where Am I?

Peter · April 23, 2014 · Leave a Comment

Look, if you have your act together, you will eventually sell your advertising or design agency and get to work from San Miguel de Allende (I just had drinks from this bar.) Dig?

This is not an impossible dream, it just takes some planning. Don’t be a me-too agency. Me-too has no value. Zip. So, you 50+ agency owners, give me a shout.

The American Retirement Savings Deficit Meets China

Peter · October 9, 2012 · 1 Comment

A central theme in “Boomercide” is our retirement savings deficit. According to Retirement USA, the difference between what Americans will need for retirement and what they have actually saved is $6.6 trillion.

The Employee Benefit Research Institute reports on the average retirement savings of various age groups. The current figures are scary:

Workers ages 45-54 have saved just under $44,000.

Baby boomers, those aged 55-64, have approximately $65,000 in savings.

People 65+ have saved $56,000. If you retire at 65 and live to 85, that $56,000 doesn’t go very far.

According to Reuters’ article “China slides faster into pensions black hole”, it looks looks like we are not alone. China is graying a an incredibly fast pace and the one child policy is a major issue. Here are some of their numbers:

“Policy makers and economists have long been worried about the financial burden of China’s expanding patchwork of pension schemes, but those concerns have recently escalated as its rural pension scheme took off in the past three years.

The funding shortage is daunting: economists say it could blow out to a whopping $10.8 trillion in the next 20 years from $2.6 trillion in 2010, towering over China’s $3 trillion onshore savings, the biggest hoard of domestic savings in the world.

Funding shortfalls hit 16.5 trillion yuan in 2010, the two economists said, and will quadruple to a stunning 68.2 trillion yuan by 2033. That is about 40 percent of China’s gross domestic product, assuming its economy grows 6 percent a year.

Unless China diverts 80 percent of dividends from listed state firms to pension funds to balance the pension account by 2050, they said, the nation may suffer “enormous fiscal stress”.”