The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

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.

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.

Agency Week Is Back And New Inbound Agency Coaching Cohorts Are Launching

After a whirlwind week of sessions, conversations, meeting, product launches and parties, Inbound 17 is behind us. Back to work at our agencies. Now we face the real challenges. How do we grow our agencies? How do we make them more profitable? How do we decide what services to offer and most importantly, how do we make sure our agencies are differentiated?

This is not easy work folks. This is heavy lifting. What I can tell you from running a growing agency for over 15 years is that this work never stops. Even agencies like Square 2 Marketing have challenges we’re working on every single day. How to be more profitable, how to close more new clients, how to get current clients even better results and how to make sure prospects know exactly why they want to do business with us.

Investing Just Two Hours A Month Has A Massive Impact On Growth At Your Firm

I get the pleasure of talking to five to seven inbound marketing agency owners each week. What I hear the most is they all have elements of their business that needs fixing and they all don’t have the time to fix them. Many of them sound frustrated, some of them have their hair on fire and others have simply accepted this condition as their new normal.

I’m not a time management expert, but I do have experience growing a digital marketing agency from three people to 50 people. I know we would have never grown to $7M in revenue by accepting the status quo or never finding the time to work on the business.  I’ll go so far as to say, it’s one of the major contributing factors to our growth.

Vision. Mission and Values Helps You Match Strategy To Hiring

So you’ve decided you want to grow your inbound marketing agency and you’re ready to hire. But are you really ready to hire? Do you have a solid growth strategy in place? Can you articulate your mission, vision and core values for your agency? Do you want to be a ten person, 20 person or 100 person agency? Are you ALL IN on inbound or planning to simply add inbound services to your list of other services?

It’s going to be very challenging hiring if you don’t have these questions locked down in your mind and in the mind of your team members, partners and outside advisors.

For the past few weeks we’ve been talking about how to scale an inbound marketing agency. Who to hire, who to promote, whether to staff the team with internal or external resources and how to organize the agency for today and for tomorrow.

But I thought it might be interesting to share with you what an inbound agency looks like from the inside. Not what you see from the outside or what other people tell you about their inbound agency, but what goes on inside – day in and day out.

I don’t know about your agency, but ours always feels a little like a bee hive to me. Perhaps that’s why our Hive Team names became so sticky so fast.

It sounds irresistible. You don’t have to hire a single person. You don’t have to pay any taxes, healthcare or benefits.

You get people to help you do your work, deliver your client engagements, build your inbound marketing agency and all you have to do is select them from a pool and pay them a fair fee for their contribution. If you like them you continue, if you don’t you never have to speak with them again. If only it was that easy.

I know plenty of agency owners who don’t have a single employee, they freelance out everything. I also know for them, it works. It works primarily because they’re running a “lifestyle” business. They don’t want employees, they want to leave at 3PM to watch their child’s softball game and they want to take 8 weeks of vacation every single year. I applaud their focus, resolve and their ability to create the perfect business for their personal goals.