The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

I get asked two questions when it comes to inbound agency growth. The first one is “How do we get more new clients?” and the second is “How do we get our current clients better results?” These are both good questions and both important aspects of agency operations that should be getting a fair amount of attention from agency owners. 

I think we talk more about how to get new clients, so today let’s focus on getting clients better results. The inbound agency team structure has a ton to do with giving your team enough time, attention, direction and experience to drive client results—no matter what results you’ve agreed to with your clients.

I want to preface the advice I provide here by pointing out that inbound marketing agencies are all different and  each agency is going to have to make the inbound marketing team structure decisions that are right for you and your shop. However, I will also tell you that we’ve run through a wide variety of team structures and the structure I describe here has been the only one that allows us to provide clients great experiences AND allows us to scale as we grow.

Last week I wrote about our changing perspective on projects vs. retainers and today I’m talking about our changing perspective on generalists vs. specialists when it comes to team structure and organizational planning.

Over the past year, we’ve learned a lot about running a more profitable agency. A 20% net profit margin target is insight. As you might know, many traditional agencies are able to do 20% net profit or even higher but the inbound marketing agency struggle to be profitable and you might see 5% net profit in a good month.