Shel Perkins, President, Shel Perkins & Associates
Shel is a designer, management consultant and educator with more than twenty years of experience in managing the operations of leading creative firms. He provides management-consulting services to a wide range of firms in both traditional and new media.
The revised and expanded second edition of his best-selling book, Talent Is Not Enough: Business Secrets For Designers, was recently published by New Riders. He teaches courses in professional practices at the California College of the Arts, the Academy of Art in San Francisco and the University of California. He has served on the national board of the Association of Professional Design Firms, leads the AIGA Center for Practice Management and has been honored as an AIGA Fellow "in recognition of significant personal and professional contributions to raising the standards of excellence within the design community."
Blair Enns, Win Without Pitching
Blair Enns’ is on a mission to change the way creative services are bought and sold the world over. Through his global consulting practice Blair works with principals and personnel of design firms, ad agencies, public relations practices and other creative businesses to help them transform from a high cost, pitch-based business development strategy to one where the firm commands the high ground in the relationship and shapes how its services are bought and sold.
Through his global consulting practice Enns works with owners of advertising agencies, design firms and public relations practices to help them transform from a high-cost, low-integrity, pitch-based business development strategy to one in which the agency commands the high ground in the relationship and shapes how its services are bought and sold.
As a speaker and author, Blair endeavors to be the sand in the industry-wide pitch machine, questioning creative firms and clients alike on the sanity of the pitch-based approach. Beyond questioning, however, he offers an alternative way forward for creative businesses, delivering a new set of protocols on how to gain new clients without first parting with ideas or sacrificing respect.
Blair has lectured and consulted across the Americas, Europe, Australia and the Middle East, addressing many national and international conferences of design, advertising and public relations. Prior to launching Win Without Pitching in 2001, Blair spent 12 years working in account service and business development roles for some of the world's largest ad agencies and some of its smallest design firms.
Blair Enns is author of the self-published Win Without Pitching – Sales Success for Marketing Communication Agencies, and author of the Win Without Pitching Newsletter. He has been published in Design Week magazine (UK – April 2007) and the journal Persuading (August, 2004, February 2005). His paper on Key Performance Indicators for Professional Practice Development was presented at the World Congress on Total Quality Management (2005).
Enns is a member of the Canadian Association of Management Consultants. He operates from the remote mountain village of Kaslo, British Columbia, Canada, where he lives with his wife and four children.
Tony Mikes, Second Wind
Second Wind's managing director Anthony P. Mikes is a former advertising executive who spent twenty-five years managing and owning advertising agencies and graphic design studios. Mr. Mikes came to recognize the value of shared information as it relates to successfully managing an advertising agency. Second Wind (Mr. Mikes' second life in advertising) was the result.
Twenty-Four years later, a thought leader and innovator, Second Wind is committed to providing world-class content, advice and services to help advertising, graphic design, marketing, interactive and pubic relations firms grow and succeed...in fact, to BE better. Second Wind can be accessed at www.secondwindonline.com.
Mr. Mikes conducts agency management workshops, serves as a management consultant to individual agencies, and has addressed many advertising associations and trade organizations. He is also a contributing writer to numerous industry trade publications.
Mr. Mikes shares his industry know-how monthly in The Second Wind Newsletter, an overview of the advertising and design industry from the smaller agency principal's viewpoint. You can read the compiled wisdom of Mr. Mikes in The Small Agency Survival Manual; LifeBlood: A 365-Days-A-Year New Business Plan for Small Agencies, and The Account Service Bible; all published by Second Wind Ltd.