The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

Besides the 30 or so agency owners I’m actively working with right now, I talk to roughly another 10 to 15 agency owners each month who reach out with basic questions. The time I spend with them gives me insight into the specific challenges facing agency owners today.

Anyone who has talked to me in the past or has taken the time to get to know me is aware that I’ll give any agency owner 30 minutes to talk shop, help them with challenge and share any insights I’ve gained over the past 17 years running Square 2.

Working with other agency owners is one of my passions. Over the past few months, I started noting the questions people ask and its crystal clear to me that everyone has very similar challenges.

We started transforming Square 2 into an agile agency back in September of 2014. As one of the first agencies to adopt the Agile Methodology (back then there were only two other shops that I was aware of who ran agile), today we have buckets and buckets of experience making agile work.

Last week at HubSpot’s Partner Day in Boston, being agile was again noted by a few of the presenting agencies as one of their “secrets” to success.

But the agile we practice is not even close to the agile we rolled out in September of 2014. Almost five years later, the way we use agile to service our clients has changed dramatically.

It’s Not Uncommon To Have To Adjust Your Plan Quickly, Make Sure Your Agency Is Capable

If you read the blog regularly then you know I like to blog about ways to get better results from your marketing and sales execution. I also like to share my experiences working with CEOs of growing companies, especially when those observations become trends.

One of our newer clients kicked off their engagement in March, early March to be exact. During the sales process, we create our new client’s initial 90-day plan and this client was no different. Clients sign off on that initial 90-day plan and then we reinforce that agreed to 90-day plan during the kick-off.

All of this went down without a hitch until during the fifth week of the engagement I got an email from the client who was concerned about our progress.

Six Areas Inbound Marketing Agency Owners Need To Focus On Next Year To Make 2017 Your Best Year Ever!

I wanted to let everyone know how grateful I am for all the warm wishes and wonderful feedback all the agency owners have provided me over the past year or two. Many of you have worked directly with me on your agencies in one form or the other and the progress you’ve all made is wonderful.

To give back, I’d love to be able to give all of you a gift on this holiday season. Obviously, that would be a logistical challenge as well as setting me back financially. However, I can give you the gift of knowledge and here’s a little chance for me to give you what I wish I could give you and let you know why these are the most important gifts you should be giving yourself this season.

You’re back from Inbound 16, Thanksgiving is behind you and you’re all in on taking your inbound marketing agency and making it 100% agile.

You attended a few sessions, spoke with some other owners about agile, you did some research, it sounds like the answer to your prayers. Slow down Speedy Gonzales, there are a few things to think about before you start down this path.

Not every agency is ready to move to agile. Not every agency is going to see the benefits from moving to agile. Not all your clients are going to see improved results by you moving to agile. Agile is not right for every agency and every agency owner. However, some of you are ready.

If you’ve been paying attention to what other agency owners are talking about you probably heard something about Agile Marketing.

Maybe you know what it is, maybe you don’t. Maybe you’ve tried it, maybe you are considering it, maybe you’re already doing it. Regardless, its time you all got comfortable enough with it to think about it for your inbound marketing agency.

More and more agencies are considering going to points based pricing. It makes a lot of sense. You don’t want to charge by the hour and you don’t want to be arguing with clients every time something takes longer than they think it should take to deliver.

However, points based pricing is not a magical answer to a more complicated challenge. Simply converting an hour of work into a single point is not going to fool anyone and it’s not going to help you get paid true value for the work you're doing.

Here are some considerations as you try to decide to use points or not to use points.

We’ve been on a mission to move our entire agency to agile during 2016. We accepted that this was a long term move, one that would take us months to master. We started testing various components of agile marketing with different teams back in late 2015 and then made the decision, based on the results of our testing, to go all in this year.

In January, we moved project management systems, we reassigned resources, we trained our team on Scrum, we hired an agile consultant and started managing all our client engagements with Scrum as the core methodologies.

Here’s what our inbound marketing agency learned after two full months.

Look up agile marketing on the web and you get so few listings it’s hard to believe. Most of the listings don’t even refer to the application of Agile and Scrum as it relates to ongoing marketing operations. They talk about being flexible and adopting a less rigid approach to marketing or using data to decide what to work on—all good ideas, but not really Agile Marketing as I see it.

Not all digital or creative agencies need to work in an agile way, but for the inbound marketing agency, it’s critical in my opinion. When you start researching the Agile or when you read the book, How To Deliver Twice The Work In Half The Time by Jeff Sutherland, the first phrase you hear is how great agile is for complex and creative tasks. Yes, this was meant to describe software development efforts but when I think about inbound marketing engagements, complex and creative are two words at the top of the list.