The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

It’s Not Easy, But Growth Is Definitely Possible If You Have These Ingredients In This Mix

I’ve been running and growing a digital agency for the past 18 years. We started in 2003, before Facebook was even a company. We’ve had our ups and downs like every business. We’ve had some great years and some tough years. We’ve managed through the financial crisis, a major recession, and now a pandemic.

We’ve partnered with technology companies, redefined how we deliver services, doubled down on strategy, acquired six other agencies, and reorganized our team more times than I can remember. This is all because we wanted to be better.

All The Signals Are There, If You Stop Long Enough To Notice Them

Running a digital agency over the past few years has been challenging but running one in 2020 is extremely challenging. Who would have thought we would be dealing with a global pandemic, recession, political uncertainty, and protests in the streets?

Having run and grown a successful agency over the past 17 years has taught me a couple of very valuable lessons. The biggest is being able to notice signals and make adjustments to our agency based on those signals.

It helped us get through the financial crisis in 2008. It helped us get through the explosion of inbound agencies and it’s helping us navigate uncharted waters today.

Other Agencies Are Leveraging Cohorts To Improve Their Agencies And You Can Too

In our Mastermind Group Session last month, one of the members mentioned he regularly shares with clients that he’s part of an international group of agency owners who get together monthly to talk about ways to improve agency delivery, performance, and innovation.

That was pretty savvy on his part, but it also got me thinking, “yes, this is an international group of agencies who are proactively working together to make their agencies great.”

It didn’t take me long to start thinking about how other agencies can potentially work ON their businesses. I’ve said many times, as agency owners, we work IN the business way too much and not ON the business as often as we should.

You might be surprised that most of my inspiration and innovation comes from outside our industry. While there are agencies who I admire and other larger professional services firms who we aspire to be like—there are still many interesting lessons to be learned from companies outside our direct space.

For example, a lot of what we do at Square 2 from a delivery and client services perspective has been adapted from the software development industry and the military.

The service experience we are working toward is modeled after the way Disney approaches taking care of its guests and our sales process is designed around the way a white-water rafting company would create a trip for your family.

The short answer is no. You don’t need to acquire other agencies to grow, but it sure does help. Think about it like this. Would you pay a sales rep $100,000 if they were going to bring you a guaranteed $1 million dollars in new business? Of course.

What about if you could hire 10 highly qualified, amazing, culturally perfect new team members in one afternoon? And you had revenue to pay them all. Would you do that? Of course, you would.

What about filling a gap in your current delivery? For example, what if you’re just ok at paid media and paid search, but by acquiring a company you’re instantly at the top of your game in terms of getting clients results from their paid media programs? Anyone would say yes to this scenario too.

“You should start your own agency, you’re a great designer, website guy or search engine expert.” That’s probably why you started your agency, everyone encouraged you to branch out on your own and now that you’re on your own, you realize you—are on your own.

What you’ve already learned is that starting, running and then growing an agency are three distinctly different challenges. You’ve probably also learned that getting over the $1MM mark is very hard. 

If you’ve done that already heads up, there is another hurdle at the $2MM mark and then again at the $4MM mark.

They are all different in the nature of those challenges and definitely in the answers to getting past those challenges.

Investing Just Two Hours A Month Has A Massive Impact On Growth At Your Firm

I get the pleasure of talking to five to seven inbound marketing agency owners each week. What I hear the most is they all have elements of their business that needs fixing and they all don’t have the time to fix them. Many of them sound frustrated, some of them have their hair on fire and others have simply accepted this condition as their new normal.

I’m not a time management expert, but I do have experience growing a digital marketing agency from three people to 50 people. I know we would have never grown to $7M in revenue by accepting the status quo or never finding the time to work on the business.  I’ll go so far as to say, it’s one of the major contributing factors to our growth.

Last week I spent a few days at Inbound15 with 14,000 inbound marketing pros and there were around 2,000 agencies represented at the event. Today there are more inbound marketing agencies than ever before. What does that mean to you? It means you have to innovate and differentiate your inbound agency if you want to stand out.

Yes you want to be different with your stories and messaging but another way to separate your agency from other agencies is to innovate your delivery model and innovate your service offering.