A Teaching Advertising Agency

I have been asked on several occasions what I consider to be my greatest achievement. You can read my Bio which is connected to this blog and see a long list of awards and honors. But you will not find my greatest achievement there.
My greatest achievement is the college graduates that I hired and trained over the years.

If there is a single statement that defines our agency, I hope it would be that Roska is a Teaching Advertising Agency. An agency that provides marketing and advertising education and training to future leaders in our field.

It all started many years ago when I realized that whenever one of my managers needed to hire somebody, they would say to me, "I need somebody with experience." So we would search for somebody with experience and usually find out that experience does not always equate to excellence. We would end up having to train the individual anyway and the first part of the training was to correct all of the bad training they had from their previous experiences.

In the past when we hired young, recent graduates, we did what most agencies do; we threw them into the water and if they could swim, they made it. Like most advertising agencies, we wrecked a lot of good young people like that. The young hires were overwhelmed and judged harshly, many burned out early and left for other careers.

College makes the cup, life fills it.
The aha! moment came when I realized that hiring a college grad with a degree in marketing/advertising, a 4.0 GPA, captain of the cheerleaders and student body president didn't mean squat if we did not have a proper training program in place.
I'm not talking about a training program to learn how to do marketing and advertising. They learn that just from working with the experts on the agency staff. I'm talking about a training program that teaches the lessons they will need to know for the rest of their life.

How to manage their time
How to multi-task
How to delegate
How to dress
How to resolve disputes
How to present
How to lead
How to follow
How to teach others

These are life lessons that when learned properly lead to excellence. And every trainee receives intensive training in these points during their first year at Roska.

If you have been reading previous posts, you have seen seveal references and stories about some of my training experiences. I'll leave you with this one.

One of the things that must be dealt with early when we hire a new graduate, is how to dress. Young people right out of college dress well for their interview, but usually lapse back into college attire within their first 30 days. I remember a young lady, very smart, very attractive who wore very short skirts. I took her aside and pointed out that I wanted our clients to admire her for her intelligence and great marketing; not for her great ass.

She replied, with a look of total innocence, "This skirt passed the 'hands over the head' test."

Jon