Business Director

You will own the P&L across your client portfolio, managing multi-million pound budgets and ensuring accurate cost estimates, formal budgets, and target margins are met, providing sound forecasting along the way. Overall you will lead your team to drive client growth and success, whilst partnering with the business to generate growth across the broader agency.

You will be expected to:

1. Lead, motivate, recruit, induct, develop, retain, and appraise your team to set them and you up for success.
2. Possess integrated media knowledge, not just digital.
3. Lead, manage, and own the P&L for your client group and business units, identifying areas of organic growth and new revenue streams.
4. Be the lead adviser, managing key senior/strategic stakeholders and helping them with their business issues.
5. Lead your team to develop strategic relationships with senior clients and budget holders; position the agency as a key strategic partner.
6. Oversee BD’s in leading the agency’s strategic response to briefs, helping to evaluate responses in terms of quality and budget, and benchmarking against objectives/KPIs set.

Lead the team and business with a focus on award-winning work:

1. Lead the BD’s and business units to develop and maintain in-depth knowledge of clients’ business, market, competitors, and media; keep this updated at all times.
2. Exploit agency marketing tools to understand client brand and business.
3. Role model curiosity and encourage your team to ask questions, show enthusiasm, and give that little bit extra when needed without being asked.
4. Understand your team and what motivates them; know what the agency can offer clients and build strong relationships across the business and the account.

Leading teams and business: Manage the team and self to achieve goals and deliver on agency and client KPIs.

Provide ongoing feedback and coaching on performance and career to team members; manage team development plans, ensure they undertake relevant learning, and hold regular career development forums providing a structured plan.

Manage the ongoing relationship with senior client contacts:

1. Ensure the team delivers first-class account management, producing outputs on time and on budget.
2. Conduct regular reviews of work with the team to identify new ways of working that improve the quality of work and acknowledge successes.

Ensure work is always of high quality; work with the team to develop inspiring briefs which help deliver the best strategic work that clients value.

Strategic planning and decision making: Ensure BD’s lead and own partnership with the Planning and Creative teams to deliver creative excellence and produce ideas which answer the brief whilst exciting and challenging the client.

Take a lead in the objective and constructive review of work, providing clear insight into consumer and client expectations; share feedback and learnings within the team and across the agency.

Digital Media: Exhibit and build on a track record of maintaining partnerships with data and digital. Ensure clients and team have a full understanding of integrated media vehicles and support with training where necessary. Lead the understanding of performance and digital media across the team.

Trends, insights and innovation: Lead the sourcing of credible insights from a variety of sources to inform planning recommendations for Business Directors and the wider team. Demonstrate effective skills in ‘storytelling’ when preparing a strategic media recommendation.

Uphold a touch-point approach through use of industry and proprietary research tools. Contribute to innovation idea generation, and ensure best practices flow across your client portfolio.

Commercial and financial acumen: Be wholly accountable for the P&L for your business areas and for the client revenue targets across your accounts; implement SLAs; ensure accurate forecasting and a focus on growing targets on a continuous basis.

Oversee account financials and educate your team to understand invoicing, suppliers, commission, revenue, time, hourly rates; monitor profitability and budgets of individual jobs; spot business opportunities and work with seniors to leverage these; manage timely reporting through the team.

Oversee forecasting tool utilization and feeds, demonstrating a strategic understanding of business revenue challenges, and a creative approach to deliver against targets; ensure Business and Media Directors understand the implications of financial accuracy across their client areas.

Driving for results: Manage the production, digital, media, and creative process to meet agreed schedules and deliverables; support your team to build positive relationships and work closely with other departments.

Manage the team to ensure full understanding of the briefing process and what is required both from a client perspective (budget, timescales, briefs etc.) and from an internal perspective (consumer insight, production information, competitor awareness etc); manage relationships with external partner agencies.

Third party relationships & Collaboration: Lead relationships with media owners to maximize results for our clients, and improve service delivery to the wider team.

Demonstrate creativity with negotiations, and share success stories with the wider team.

Demonstrate leadership capability with key clients, ensuring junior team members deliver best practice client service. Be prepared to challenge and interrogate client briefs and prepare proactive, inspiring responses.

Demonstrate openness to work with wider agency teams on new business projects as well as day-to-day business. Provide leadership to the wider media team, developing initiatives to foster learning and development.