At AD Communications, training is something that is at the forefront of every line manager’s mind. Recently, we received in-house training delivered by one of our Joint Managing Directors – Shireen Shurmer.
Before the training, Shireen spoke to us both (Aimee Parsons – who started a year ago, and Emily Fennell – who’s more than five years into her role) and she asked: “What do you want to get out of this training and, what do you want to learn?” What a great place to start! As members of the agency support team, it’s just not a standard question to be asked by an MD. It was a breath of fresh air to be able to say, “we want to really understand our clients and what they do.” Yes, it was that simple. To support our team properly, we feel it’s important to know as much as possible about who they’re working with and what we’re doing for them.
A week later, Shireen walked into the training room with nothing but a flipchart and a marker pen.
She gave us an overview of who our clients are and the impact they have on the industries they operate in. It’s safe to say that our clients produce some amazing things! The niche worlds of print, packaging, visual communications and manufacturing that we work in have a much bigger impact on our day-to-day lives than we had previously thought.
Some of our clients are part of companies that produce multi-million-dollar printing equipment. Others create specialised products from textiles to packaging – one of which even coats the inside of packaging to prevent food from discolouring!
We then delved into the specifics of what we offer as an integrated communications agency. Shireen explained that we cover the full breadth of communications from PR, marketing, and social media, to video, design, and advertising. After this, we were able to better understand the different communication channels we’d seen our colleagues using around the office. We discussed the different reasons each one is used, and how the skills of everyone in the agency comes together to integrate them all for clients. After such a detailed explanation, it answered our ultimate question – “what makes our clients stay with us for so long?” In that moment, it was obvious.
At the beginning of this training session, we entered the room with so many questions. After the whole picture was explained to us, we left feeling confident and motivated that we now appreciate the unique offering that our clients present within the specialist sectors we serve.
And, with a better understanding of just some of our client challenges – and our agency’s out of the box solutions to them – we’re now clear on how and why we are able to solve pretty much any problem they throw our way.