The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

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.

“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.

We all end up headed out to the supermarket with our list of items for the Thanksgiving Day feast. Condensed milk, pumpkin or a bunch of green onions its always something. In the spirit of my favorite holiday, here’s a shopping list for inbound marketing agency owners.

These are items you’re going to need in 2017. The competition is picking up, the number of companies looking for inbound marketing is increasing too and now sales enablement software and services are making our agencies very popular. However, if you’re missing even one of the items on this list, you have your work cut out for you.

Having worked with over 100 inbound marketing agency owners over the past two years and having talked to four or five times that since launch Agencies 2 Inbound, I’ve started to see a pattern in the issues and challenges facing the inbound agency community.

Below I’ve listed out the seven most common challenges agency owners share with me during our conversations and these are in order. The first is the most common and so on down the list. I’m sure these won’t surprise many of you and perhaps you have similar challenges with your agency.

I’m also including a collection of recommendations on how you fix these challenges so you can cross these off your list and move on to other issues that will undoubtedly pop up when these are corrected. Here we go!

Does it sometimes feel like your inbound agency is like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? You’re mad to process as many blog articles, landing pages and new websites through the shop and still make a profit while having to be hyper creative and flexible when clients need that strategic thinking?

How do you teach your team to follow your processes because the efficiency makes you inbound marketing agency money and at the same time get them to understand that each client needs to have a highly creative, collaborative and educational experience with your agency?

Yes, that’s a monumental challenge. Welcome to the world of inbound agencies, where for the first time in your history you have to be great at both to make money and get your clients the leads they need to continue supporting inbound.

I get a lot of questions about the finance and the funding required to grow an inbound agency. I especially like getting the opportunity to answer questions like this on the blog. 

I want to preface that banking, finance and business funding are not my areas of expertise. If you want your business to grow with marketing and sales—I’m your guy.

When it comes to finance I would quickly point you to other experts. But having operated a profitable inbound agency for over 13 years, I’m obviously doing something right and I’m happy to share what I do know about this topic.

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.

SPECIAL REPORT: How To Get Your Project Clients To Be Inbound Agency Clients In Just 30 Minutes

My work with inbound marketing agency owners has given me tremendous insight into the major challenges facing owners today and by far the biggest challenge is moving away from your legacy project clients and towards more stable inbound retainer clients.

The challenges are real and sometimes seem insurmountable. How do you walk away from revenue? How do you turn down business? How do you afford your team if you’re not doing projects? Where will new retainer clients come from if we don’t do projects? If I tell clients no, who’ll hire us? I get it. There are a lot of questions.

In this Special Report, I’ll help you work through all these issues so you successful manage a full transition from commoditized project shop to unique inbound agency.

Every business has magic numbers that help leaders gain insight into the performance of the organization. Inbound agencies are no different but they are unique in that there are very few existing models from which to benchmark your agency against other similar agencies.

Once you create a dashboard of KPIs (key performance indicators) you’re going to see your entire agency responding differently to those numbers. There are gobs of data that prove people do what you measure. So as you work your way up the inbound marketing agency growth tree you need to set numeric goals for your crew.

Here are some of the numbers you want to consider when setting up your KPI dashboard.

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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