Andrew Graff, CEO of Allen & Gerritsen, wrote his manifesto from the birthplace of a bigger one. With the country’s 250th anniversary approaching and offices in Boston and Philadelphia, the timing felt less like coincidence than assignment.
“Thinking about the country’s 250th anniversary, and thinking about what created the Declaration,” Graff says, “it was that declaration against the hierarchy and the monarchy.” The parallel to agency life wrote itself. “Let’s stop talking and start doing. Bring the indies together. It’s not going to get solved by one agency, it’s not going to get solved by clients — but we’re all talking about it. So how do we go from talk to action?”
A 40-year habit nobody questions
This is not a new fight, and Graff knows it. Nearly a decade ago he sat at a 4A’s conference listening to pricing consultant Tim Williams lay out the industry’s inflection points — commoditization, work moving in-house, automation, the margin squeeze, the endless pressure to do more for less.
“Almost 10 years later, we’re still talking about this,” Graff says. “This whole time-based thing is over 40 years old. We conditioned everybody like that was the standard.” Now AI has sharpened the same question to a point. Do more for less, indeed.
Somebody will always do it cheaper
Every agency leader has heard the client reflex: someone will do it for less, so I’ll go find them. With roughly 15,000 agencies in the U.S., Graff concedes the point — and then flips it.
“There always will be somebody that will do it cheaper. But the real question is, what’s your value as an agency?” He credits a consultant’s questionnaire for the sharpest version of it, the one he keeps returning to: “If you didn’t exist tomorrow, what would your clients miss the most?”
An in-house team is a department, he notes, but “the core of what an agency is doing is creativity.” The job is to not lose sight of creativity and craft.
The U2 problem and the 15% tax
Graff’s favorite analogy involves a stadium, not a spreadsheet. “We’re not paying for the number of hours [U2] plays. We pay for the experience.” Nobody counts Larry Mullen’s drum strokes. Yet agencies bill their craft by the tick of a clock.
The cost of that habit is real. “There’ve been all these stats that say we spend at least 15% of our time chasing down time,” he says — reconciling it, and rarely getting made whole for the overage anyway. “Imagine if you put that effort into managing scope instead of managing hours.” And scope creep still has guardrails without a stopwatch. “What if it’s rounds of revisions? It’s more tangible.”
Getting your swagger on
None of this is easy, and Graff won’t pretend otherwise. When he took it on eight years ago, “it was like swimming against the tide. You have to get your swagger on. You have to believe in what you’re doing, and you can’t be afraid to walk away.” How often did walking away actually cost him a client? “About 3% of the time.” As Zanger put it, that’s batting .600.
The leverage, he argues, belongs to independents — the people who started agencies to buck the system in the first place. “Indies of all sizes can band together and be brave together and learn from each other. You can change the industry when there’s more voices, not a couple of institutions doing it.”
Asked for the first line item he’d delete from every agency-of-record contract, Graff needs one word. “Hours.” Timesheets, he adds, are “made up after-the-fact information that we threaten somebody to fill out.” The better test is simpler: do you really understand what it takes to solve the challenge? It was all in the spirit of independence. So, Graff figured, let’s declare our own.
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