The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

I try to give agency owners a lot of practical advice. I know many of you are technically capable of doing what you need to grow, but there are just forks in the road, potholes, unforeseen challenges and decisions that seem to slow down your growth.

One of the biggest challenges is simply working IN the business, instead of working ON the business. If there was a single piece of advice I could share with agency owners it would be to carve out at least 2 hours every month to stop working in the business and work on it.

This would allow you to consider how you differentiate, how you can add a few new tech partners, how you can improve your delivery, what new services you can offer, and how you can help your client services team be better consultants.

The Misconception That What We Do Is Easy, Cheap and Can Be Done By Anyone

If you’ve been running an agency for at least a few years, you’ve probably heard this: “We’re bringing it in-house.” While most are nice about it and see this as a strategic decision, what they’re really saying is they think they can do what you do for less.

 As recently as last week, a very happy client of ours hired a twenty-something marketing manager with a few years of experience to take over the strategic work we’ve been successfully executing for them. In the very first meeting, she expressed concern over what it cost us to create content as compared to what she found by working with a writing service.

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.

For those of you who know me (really know me), you also know that I’ll talk to any agency owner at any time and anything I can do to help them with their challenges, I’m happy to do so.

Agencies 2 Inbound recently celebrated its four year anniversary. I started working with other agencies in March of 2015. Over the past four years, I’ve worked with over 120 agency owners. That is a much bigger number than I ever expected, and I am honored to have worked with and helped that many people.

One of the reasons I love Agencies 2 Inbound so much is the responses I get from other agency owners and the impact I’ve had on their companies and their lives.

I often look back through old blog article to make sure that I’m always covering new ground and writing about new topics, but this topic is so common and its been almost three years since I talked about strategies behind hiring, that it seemed like a good starting point for 2019.

Today a lot of agencies are growing. I’ve spoken to several agency owners recently who shared with me, they’ve grown from $300,000 to $600,000 in the last year or from $700,000 to $1.5 million over the past 18 months. A lot of agencies are growing so their obvious question is, “as we grow, who do we hire, in what order and into what role?”