You can’t cut your own hair.

I’ve heard some reticence from my client and agency friends about outside resources.

For clients, it is the concern that these outside folks won’t have the depth of knowledge about their product or service. Exactly. That’s why you want fresh eyes on your product. Sometimes you get so caught up in the minutia of your professional existence that you lose the big picture. You forget that the consumer doesn’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of your category.

For agencies, you get caught up in getting the day-to-day and lose track of why clients brought you in in the first place. You are the fresh eyes that I spoke about in the last paragraph. So stop reacting and start leading.

If you are an agency or if you are responsible for ideas, once a quarter, bring in a team of freelance creatives. These people are paid to generate ideas and are comfortable coming up with a quantity of ideas. Pay them by the hour.

Put a little time into how you will direct the brainstorm. Don’t just give them your problem and ask them to solve it, even though they will. Ask them to do a little homework an come with examples of ideas they like.

As a creative, I always enjoyed what I called the cheap, one-night stand of concepting. That is, just create a bunch of ideas and don’t worry about how they might be carried out thru a variety of media.

You’ll find those people who will give you a couple of hours for a couple of hundred dollars. Rotate thru some and keep some you really like.

Every quarter, you’ll work on the idea part of the business and not just the execution part of the business. Keep your people in the room with the concepters and they will come out energized. And you’ll have a hundred new ideas every quarter.

Look, they won’t all be good. They won’t be all brand voice correct. They may not pass the CEO’s crazy tests. But fresh perspectives are where ideas are born. And you don’t have that perspective if you’ve been caught up in the day-to-day of your business.

Fresh Perspectives. It’s as easy as remembering that you can’t cut your own hair.