The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

One of my favorite pastimes is talking to agency owners. I have casual conversations with agency owners a few times a week. I like hearing about their successes, their stories, their challenges and specifically, I like hearing the questions they’re wrestling with.

By the way, if you ever want to pick my brain or just chat for 30 minutes, I’ll talk to anyone, anytime. All you have to do is reach out.

Anyway, one of the more common sets of questions from owners is, “When do we need a leadership team? How do we go about building one? What should it look like?”

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.

Hiring Consultants Is Risky, Don't Make A Bad Hiring Decision in 2020

A lot of agencies are growing and that means hiring. But hiring the wrong person can set you back months. Even worse, hiring someone who is mediocre can put you in this weird position where they are too good to fire, but not good enough for you to be 100% comfortable that they’ll take wonderful care of your clients.

Both of these conditions are bad for your agency.  In this article, we’ll talk about how to avoid this.

The digital marketing industry is booming, and professionals with skills in digital marketing are in high demand. A 2018 survey by LinkedIn reported a shortage of 230,000 people with marketing skills in the 20 largest metro areas polled.

With a limited number of amazing candidates and a high risk for making a hiring mistake, what should you be looking for in 2020 when hiring new consultants for our digital agency?

I looked back at my records and realized I’ve worked with over 150 agencies since starting Agencies 2 Inbound back in March of 2015. I’m proud and extremely happy to consider everyone I’ve worked with a friend. Many of these owners I still talk to today.

You Can’t Do It Alone and You Shouldn’t Have To Do It Alone Anyway

There are a handful of solid agency coaches around. Most of them have the chops, experience and perspective to help you grow your agency. You might have considered working with one, then decided you’re not ready or they might not be able to help. You might have not clicked with them personally. These are all good reasons to continue on your own.

But in my experience, working with coaches and being a coach and having someone on your team to help guide you on your journey, can shave years off your path towards the agency that you aspire to own.

In fact, having someone by your side to help you skip potholes, move around detours and find the shortcuts might be one of the best decisions you’ll ever make while you manage your agency.

You Need To Drive Leads For The Agency But Resources Are Tight. How Do We Optimize Content Creation?

To answer the question in the headline, you can never have too much content for your agency’s own content marketing and lead generation efforts.

However that’s not helpful because I know most of you can’t create as much content as you’d like and by the way, this applies to your clients too. Almost no client can spend as much as you’d like them to spend on content creation.

So how do you know how much is needed to move the needle and how far is that needle going to move?

Forget The Jargon, You Want To Help Your Clients Close The Leads You're Getting Them

There are now at least three or four labels for helping companies close leads. The ones in the title and a few more; sales consulting, sales coaching, sales training and maybe a couple of others. 

The bottom line isn’t what we call it or how good we are at confusing the clients but what you do in these engagements and the value you bring to your clients.

The key for me is what we’re including in our sales optimization work for clients, how much we charge for it, the value it delivers and how this translates into lifelong clients. 

HINT: It Should Be The Same At Any-Sized Agency

As October wraps up, you’re probably starting to think about 2020 planning. Everything you read or watch between now and the end of the year is going to be encouraging you to do your 2020 plan.

But at Square 2, our 2020 plan is almost done.

No, I’m not an overachiever. Our company-wide meeting in Philly is in mid-November this year, so we had to get our planning done early.

You might be wondering what annual strategic planning looks like at Square 2. I’m happy to share with you how we do this, what we did this year and some tips on how you can make your 2020 planning easy.

With Over 200 HubSpot Customers We Know Something About This

I get it. You want to sell more HubSpot licenses. You want to make your CAM happier, you want to move up in the partner tiers, you want more commissions, and hopefully you want your clients on HubSpot because they get better results.

But how do you actually do this? The basic question is: Do you sell HubSpot? or Do you sell your agency services? Maybe it’s a combination of both, but does that get tricky?

Ask HubSpot and you might not be surprised to hear them recommend selling HubSpot. They even announced a competition at Partner Day in September. It was “Send us your best HubSpot pitch deck.”

But ask some of the top agencies and their answer could be different.