Facing friction
The agency is completely dependent on the founder. You could not step away from the business for 2 weeks without returning to major issues.
New business is feast-or-famine. Cash flow is a challenge. You don’t have a reliable lead pipeline for new business or systems to process new business consistently.
Your team is busy, but unprofitable. Revenue is coming in and the team is constantly busy. But somehow that’s not translating into stronger profits or cash reserves.
Decisions aren’t backed by data. You’d love to make decisions based on something other than your gut, but you don’t have accurate data. So you don’t have good historical data or future projections.
Everything feels ad-hoc. You live in reaction mode and always “on the back foot.” You’re so busy putting out fires that you don’t have the bandwidth to do the critical, strategic work.
The partners are running out of gas. Recently you’ve been wondering if it’s time to look for a nice Director role elsewhere. The other day, a stockist at Whole Foods caught you staring at them with envy.
⁂
Turn friction into traction
Improved profits
Uncover what's preventing your agency from becoming a high-profit shop.
On the revenue side (Revenue), I work with your leadership team to home in on what your agency is great at and who your target customer is. Then we apply this strategy work to pricing, winning new business, securing recurring revenue, and ensuring every project contributes to healthy margins and cash flow.
On the cost side (COS), we’ll benchmark costs and establish a few metrics to monitor and improve. This goes beyond direct costs that appear on your income statement; we’ll also look at opportunity costs across the org and design processes to ensure your team is making the most of time spent on driving profits.
An OS for the agency
Establish systems that streamline operations and gather insights for decision-making.
My work is the organizational equivalent of UX: I review your team’s workflows to connect dots, identify gaps, and design systems that “kill two birds with one stone,” when it comes to overhead. I implement processes that are lightweight and that unlock more time for creatives (and client work).
A second-order effect of my systems work is great data. With the new processes I’ve designed, you’ll find you also have insights into the business that you never had before. Your team will have project-level data (Project Delivery Data) and business data on trailing and leading metrics (recommended listen: AgencyHabits “Key Metrics for Agencies”) that improve how they make decisions.
Empowered teams
Reduce dependence on founders and empower high-performing teams.
One of the biggest challenge an agency faces is transitioning from a founder-led organization to a team-led organization. It takes an understanding of what roles & responsibilities the business needs as it grows, strong hiring and retention capabilities, systems for accountability, and trust that enables founders to let go.
I joined my first, founder-led agency as the 9th team member; when I departed eight years later, the team had surpassed 70 team members. So I understand what an agency needs at 10 people and what it needs at 25 people. My work brings clarity to the future shape an agency can take and then supports partners in cultivating the leaders who will realize it.