Meet Daniel Wilkins of Agency672

Today we’d like to introduce you to Daniel Wilkins.

So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
My father spent his entire career in the Outdoor Advertising business. In 1987, he purchased a small rep firm in Atlanta and our family moved to Roswell. My father immediately dissolved the exclusive agreements the rep firm had with a couple of the local billboard companies and set the company up as the first independent media agency specializing in helping advertisers and advertising agencies buy Outdoor Media nationally. I was five when we moved to Atlanta and I can remember attending Outdoor Advertising related conferences with my mother father each year. Every holiday, my father would hire me to do the holiday mailer. I would stuff envelopes and apply shipping labels for what seemed like thousands of boxes. Year after year went by and the company grew, but I still never really understood what it was he did. I just knew he was in the advertising industry and that it included a lot of billboards.

I graduated from Roswell High School in 2000 and I can remember having a conversation with my dad about what I was going to do next. I told him I had been accepted to Georgia State University and would be attending in the Fall. He asked what I planned to major in, and I told him, “business”. He then asked what I planned to do with my business degree when I got out of school, to which I replied as a matter of fact, “business”. He smiled and suggested I come work for him for a semester, get some “real world” experience, then start classes in the Spring.

Long story short, one semester turned into two, and two turned into three. After about a year, we sat down to decide whether I would stay in the business or go on to school. I decided to stay in the business and we had a gentleman’s agreement that if I couldn’t handle it at any point, he would let me go, no hard feelings. Conversely, if at any time I didn’t enjoy the business anymore, I could quite, without any hard feelings. I continued to work my way through the company, working in each department under each supervisor to learn all aspects of our business. I moved to New York in 2004, where I handled sales for the Northeast Region. I came back to Atlanta a little over a year later. In 2008, I launched the first media agency dedicated to planning and buying digital place-based media. Around the same time, I took over the family business as CEO and ran both agencies. In 2012, we had the opportunity to sell both companies to a private investment group, which we successfully completed in August of that year.

During that time, I had the privilege of working with clients across most major categories, including: Delta Airlines, William Grant and Sons (Hendrick’s Gin, Sailor Jerry Rum, Glennfiddich), Hooters Restaurants, QuikTrip, USA Networks, Starz Entertainment, Taco Bell, and P&G to name a few. Our agency won multiple media plan of the year awards as well.

After the sale of the companies, I stayed on with the new entity for about 6 months, then left to help another start up in the same industry. The situation with the startup was not ideal and they let me go in December in 2013. The same day they let me go, I launched Agency672. I had been contemplating leaving to start my own agency for a few months, but honestly, did not have the confidence to make the jump. They let me go on a Friday and by Monday I had a company name, website domains, and email, with a logo and website in development. I cannot thank that company enough for letting me go. It was scary, but it left me no other choice but to execute. The last four years have been the most fulfilling experience of my career.

It took about 8 months for business to start coming in a substantial way. During that time, my agency was also helping a non-profit that a close friend had started. The non-profit is called PVBLIC Foundation, and it exists to leverage media to create social change globally. Through a series of random events, I found myself acting as the Executive Director of the foundation, which I have remained ever since. It has been an amazing opportunity that has taken me all over the world and exposed me to the most incredible causes and social initiatives. We worked extensively with the Obama Administration’s Office of Public Engagement on movements like the It’s On Us Campaign, which addressed the issue of sexual assault on college campuses in the US. We have a partnership with the United Nations to help raise awareness around the Sustainable Development Goals. In addition to these large organizations, we also stay true to the original mission of the foundation, which is to help smaller non-profits promote their organizations and good work.

Currently, Agency672 is working with both advertising agencies and advertisers directly, across a variety of product categories, on their out-of-home/outdoor and digital/online media campaigns. We help simply the process involved with planning media campaigns, and help our clients save money by leveraging our relationships and economies of scale. PVBLIC Foundation continues to help non-profits of all sizes amplify their message and reach more people, while helping to stretch their budgets and create added value.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Yes and no. It would depend on whose perspective you were looking at it through. Yes, in that I had a HUGE opportunity available to me that most people do not. I had a family business to jump into and learn within. I do not think my father made it particularly easy for me with that structure, but the opportunity was there, which in the end, if the most important part. I had an opportunity to learn and network early and often, which has paid dividends in my career over the past five years.

Have there been struggles as well? Absolutely. When we sold the family business, sales were in a decline and my father and I had fundamentally different opinions about how to address it. Thankfully, we had the opportunity to exit in a positive circumstance, but the experience was hard and it was the first time mine and my father’s business relationship hurt our personal relationship. The experience taught me so much about my limitations and about compromise and the concept of really putting yourself in someone else’s shoes while in the midst of vehemently disagreeing with one another.

The decision to leave the company that purchased our business was difficult. I had never worked for another company (outside of jobs in high school).

Even more challenging was starting my own business. It is one thing to keep one going. It is another to start one from scratch and I have experienced many of the common challenges that new businesses experience. I have had to float expenses on credit cards, deal with late paying clients, trying to balance servicing our current clients with growing the business and acquiring new ones. Business development continues to be a pain point for us, as we have not been able to find a business development strategy that is efficient and consistently effective. I have lost my biggest client when that client represented over 50% of the revenue for the business.

I personally don’t feel that any of those things are particularly unique or worth dwelling on, and there are so many business owners out there who have had to overcome bigger struggles with less resources. I feel extremely blessed with the way things have gone in my career thus far.

Agency672, Inc. – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
On the front end of the media planning process, Agency672 helps simplify strategizing a media plan, contacting the respective media owners and negotiating the deals on our clients’ behalf. We then simplify the backend by issuing media contracts for the space that protect our clients, not the media owners. We also issue consolidated invoices for our clients’ entire media campaign, so that they can just write one check to Agency672, and we handle paying all of the individual vendors involved in a given campaign. We are an end to end solution for buying advertising media, saving our clients time and money on what is otherwise a labor-intensive and expensive process.

Our expertise is primarily in out-of-home or outdoor media. This includes billboards, transit advertising (e.g., sides of buses, MARTA posters, etc.), promotional campaigns (mobile billboards, street teams, etc.) and airport media. We do not own any of the media assets, but we do maintain relationships with all of the media vendors. This allows our clients to leverage those relationships to save time and money. Most of our clients spend relatively little in outdoor advertising, but when they work with us, we can negotiate on their behalf from our buying position, not their limited one. The 30%-40% that we save them on their media buy easily offsets the 5%-10% fee we charge for our services. Outdoor advertising remains difficult to buy, with over 1,000 media vendors across 100’s of media types nationwide. Unless an agency or a client is doing a large amount of volume on their own, it makes much more sense to use a specialist like Agency672.

What sets Agency672 apart is that I have intentionally kept the agency small, so that our clients work only with senior level staff with over 10 years of experience. All of our employees take ownership of their client relationships and their vertical of expertise. We can typically move faster than larger agencies and we are more cost effective due to the reduction in unnecessary overhead. We just REALLY love what we do, and I think that shows in the relationships we maintain with our clients and the quality of the work we do. We strive to plan media campaigns, in partnership with our clients, that overdeliver on all of the clients’ objectives.

On the non-profit side of things, the PVBLIC Foundation is the single best resource for a non-profit to help stretch their limited advertising budgets. It is our goal to deliver a 5-6x return in value on a non-profit’s advertising budget.

What is “success” or “successful” for you?
I feel most successful when I am doing one of two things. The first is continuing to challenge myself to be uncomfortable. It is easy to become complacent in our businesses, especially when things are going well. I made that mistake, in a big way, twice in my career. I want to continue to evolve my businesses and the businesses I am involved in. I am always looking for new things to get involved in, or areas to expand our existing businesses into.

I feel most successful when I am scared to death about something and push myself to get through it.

The second area is when I have taken a lesson learned from a mistake and turned it into an asset or an opportunity. I think it is very easy for me to feel “successful” when we land a new client, or when a client tells us we were instrumental in helping them grow their business. Those feelings of success, for me, are so short lived. They are gone in a flash. The successes that have been the most meaningful for me have been the ones that were born out of something I did wrong.