The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

We’re getting to that time of year again!  It’s October, November and December when everyone starts talking about setting up meetings and running through planning exercises for the upcoming year. Whether you’re using EOS, Gazelles or some other operating system, goal setting is almost always on the menu.

It’s not that hard to come up with 2020 goals. If you're going to finish up 2019 at $2 million in revenue, then shooting for $2.5, or $3 million sounds reasonable. Maybe you want to stretch and try to double? But that’s not what this article is about.

In this article, I thought I would share Square 2’s goals for 2019, our goals and planning for 2020 and the journey we took in 2019 to hit our 2019 goals. I think that's the real story, not what the goals are and how we set them but the journey to hit them in 2019 and how that is influencing our 2020 planning. I hope you agree. 

I’ve been reading a handful of celebratory announcements on social media highlighting the ascension of several agencies to Diamond or Platinum status in the HubSpot ecosystem.

This is an accomplishment, no doubt, and one any agency should be proud of but as HubSpot’s first Diamond Partner, I can assure you that status is no guarantee of success, nor is it a measure of an agency’s ability to perform.

When you think about it, partner level status simply means you’re handling a certain level of business with HubSpot as the marketing automation platform. It signals that you have acquired a certain number of HubSpot clients. The number required to achieve partner level status is not particularly high. Silver only requires $1,125 in monthly managed licensing revenue and that you sold the same $1,250 in licensing revenue. That means you can get to Silver by selling ONE nice Pro level client. That hardly qualifies you as an expert.

It’s the first week of January and hopefully you’ve already spent a good amount of time setting your goals for 2016. Make sure those goals are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-based. These SMART goals are the basis by which you’ll make decisions during the year, but more importantly how you’ll know if you're on track during the year.

Talking about goal setting and actually establishing a set of goals and KPIs (key performance indicators) is easier said than done. In this article, I’ll share with you some of the quantitative goals top tier inbound marketing agencies are deploying in 2016.

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