As a proud new member of The Difference Collective, I’m excited to be part of the growing movement to challenge the traditional agency business model. As a virtual agency, we are on an exciting journey to achieve goals that are truly worthwhile:

• Providing the best communications professionals in the world with the opportunity to work flexibly and organise their work lives to maximise their quality of life.
• Offering healthcare clients the chance to have teams made up of top-level talent in an agile business model that enables fast and flexible problem solving.
• Introducing new ways of working with a full-service communications consultancy that solve some age-old frustrations with traditional agency structures.

It is working on solutions and challenges like these that attracted me to a virtual agency and I see it as a great honour.

That is because I’ve been passionate about this issue for years. In fact, in 2014, I was invited to write a blog about why the traditional agency model was broken, and what could be done to fix it. Fast forward to 2019 and I’m just as passionate about this issue.

But the good news is that we’ve now reached a tipping point. Because as we approach the end of the decade, virtual agencies like The Difference Collective are no longer just an idea. They are no longer a pipe dream of a few innovators who knew there was an alternative agency model out there. They are here, they are blazing a trail and their time has come.

Just look at the Public Relations and Communication Association’s (PRCA) decision to create a Virtual PR Agencies group last year, with 11 founding agency members!

To do that means the virtual model has made its mark, is shaking up the industry and must be taken seriously as a major game-changer.

The fact that there is now a rich ecosystem of cloud-based collaboration technologies means that virtual agencies can focus on recruiting the best people they can find, regardless of where in the world they are, and seamlessly integrate them into client teams. Changes in how people want to work, and study after study showing the productivity and quality of life benefits of remote working, should be all the proof we need that the time for new solutions to how, when and where we do our jobs and serve our clients has well and truly arrived.

Agencies like The Difference Collective can address shortcomings inherent in traditional agency business models including our working environment, recruitment and retention challenges, account staffing, project management, budgeting, billing, profitability and more. In fact, any of us who have been in the communications consulting industry for a long time could create a laundry list of complaints we’ve heard from clients about the traditional ways that agencies do business. We now have an opportunity to fix a lot of those issues by doing things differently. And that is truly an exciting place to be.

I truly believe virtual agencies are the future. In fact, I’m so passionate about it that I’ve written a longer article on the topic, which you can read here.

And whether you are a senior healthcare comms specialist or client looking to Work Differently, please get in touch!