The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

You’re all in on HubSpot. You went all in on Inbound Marketing a few years ago. Then early last year you went all in on Inbound Sales. In September HubSpot said you should offer services for customer service too and they gave you the final piece of the puzzle, ServiceHub to go with SalesHub and MarketingHub.

To make this all easy for you, they also handed you the Flywheel to help you wrap all the hubs into a nice simple package for clients. But the services that go with both sales and customer service aren’t as easy to wrap up in a nice package, are they?

Specifically, agency services for the customer service area. Most of us can figure out sales services, but customer service—not as easy. What can a digital agency do to help customer service?

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?”

Everyone likes to do predictions at this time of year. I’m no different, especially since most people don’t remember these predictions from year to year. However, I’m willing to hold my predictions up to a higher standard. Here’s a link to the predictions I made early in 2018. Let’s see how I did.

Competition will increase and there will be commoditized pricing pressure on all agency services. Those were one and two and while maybe those weren’t the craziest prediction, they did both come true. This past year felt like there were many more agencies to compete with and major downward pressure on pricing due to the increasing number of agencies willing to do more work for less money.

Prediction number three was about consolidation in the agency market and that was true. HubSpot agencies got snapped up or merged, and agencies outside the HubSpot community are being purchased at very high rates, especially those that offer digital transformational services to large companies and major brands.

It’s one of the hardest skills you’ll need your team to deliver, but it’s also the most valuable, in my humble opinion.

How good is your team at being able to quickly look through client program performance data and derive the insights they need to improve performance? But wait, we’re not done yet!

How good are they at coming up with an action plan that includes a handful of experiments or improvement ideas based on those analytical insights to quickly increase your client’s marketing program performance metrics?

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.

During Partner Day at Inbound 18, if you were paying attention you might have heard JD Sherman, COO at HubSpot say not everyone is going to want to sell and provide services around HubSpot’s full suite of products.

I thought that was astute for HubSpot to realize that and honest for them to admit it to a few hundred of their best partners. But agencies are at an inflection point. What kind of agency do you want to be? What kind of services do you want to provide to clients?

Perhaps more importantly, is not what you want, but what your clients want and what your team is prepared to deliver. So today, here’s how to know what direction you might want to consider for your agency.

Every year thousands of agency owners and their teams make their way to Boston. Some have been coming for years. This was my eighth Inbound. When I first came to Inbound back in 2010 there were 300 attendees in a few rooms at a hotel downtown.

A few of us were remembering how much fun it was to have the entire conference and all the HubSpot people, including Brian Halligan, go from bar to bar on their annual Inbound Bar Crawl. That was a good time.

This year there were so many people that the conference has spilled out of the conference center and into adjacent hotels. Even Partner Day had to be moved to an entirely new facility. It is great to see old friends, new friends, clients, prospects, prospective new partners and all the crew from HubSpot.

In just a few days agency owners from all over the world will start their pilgrimage to Boston for Inbound 18. The annual lovefest for everything inbound. But being an agency owner and attending Inbound isn’t what it used to be.

Gone is the Agency Track and the Agency ONLY sessions. Even Partner Day, the first unofficial day of inbound is mostly dedicated to HubSpot sharing new product and pricing announcements. The days where agency leaders had a chance to share what they’re doing with other agency owners is no more.

No point in crying over spilled milk, but if you're an inbound agency owner and you’re heading to Boston here’s how to make the most of Inbound and get what your agency needs to push up to the next level.

How do we set up our agency to grow? It’s the most frequently asked question from inbound marketing agency owners.

Once you figure out the sales and marketing aspect of agency operations and you’re getting plenty of leads, closing those leads and keeping your clients happy. No easy task by the way.

Then the questions come around to scale. How do we create a scalable agency structure that allows us to grow in a controlled, low risk way?

If you’re like most agency owners, it probably feels like one step forward two steps back. In some cases, it might even be one step forward and one step back—now your simply treading water. Neither situation is where you want to be.

“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.