The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

What The Summer Of 2020 Is Signaling To Digital Agency Owners And What To Do About It

Posted by Mike Lieberman on Aug 14, 2020 8:30:00 AM

All The Signals Are There, If You Stop Long Enough To Notice Them

Running a digital agency over the past few years has been challenging but running one in 2020 is extremely challenging. Who would have thought we would be dealing with a global pandemic, recession, political uncertainty, and protests in the streets?

Having run and grown a successful agency over the past 17 years has taught me a couple of very valuable lessons. The biggest is being able to notice signals and make adjustments to our agency based on those signals.

It helped us get through the financial crisis in 2008. It helped us get through the explosion of inbound agencies and it’s helping us navigate uncharted waters today.

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Topics: agency growth strategies, 2020 planning, Response to Covid-19

What The Next Normal Looks Like For Digital Marketing Agencies

Posted by Mike Lieberman on Jun 5, 2020 8:00:00 AM

How To Get Your Agency Ready For The NOW

States and countries are starting to allow businesses to open up. I headed back to our office this week for the first time since the middle of March. But our agency will never be the same and neither will yours.

If you think you’re going back to how you worked in January, you are mistaken. If you think your clients are going to want the same thing from you as they did at the end of 2019, you’re also mistaken.

The business world and the agency world is now changing faster than ever before. You have to accelerate your own change to keep up and stay ahead of the curve. 

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Topics: 2020 planning, strategic planning, Response to Covid-19

How To Do Planning For Your Digital Agency When The Future Is Uncertain

Posted by Mike Lieberman on May 8, 2020 8:45:00 AM

Adjust, Don’t Scrap Your Strategic Planning Work

My leadership team and I met earlier this week to revisit our strategy and plan for 2020. During the conversation, we all agreed doing any long-term planning right now seemed like a waste of time given the general uncertainty facing everyone right now.

But we’ve come to lean on strategic planning as a core value at Square 2. We meet regularly, plan regularly, and create annual, quarterly, and monthly plans. We develop an annual theme to keep the team focused and energized. We identify rocks and key initiatives and then roll those down to the team aligning execution.

It has served us well for years and years. But, in the face of the obvious uncertainty, what’s an agency to do?

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Topics: strategic planning, Response to Covid-19

How Digital Agencies Are Going To Survive The Next Few Months

Posted by Mike Lieberman on Apr 9, 2020 9:15:00 AM

I’ve been through 9/11 and the financial crisis in 2008. Both events caused a massive and shocking shift in the world’s economy and what we’re all dealing with today is equally shocking.

I am in touch with close to 100 agencies in some way or another and it seems most are seeing a small to medium sized impact right now. Of course, if your agency specializes in any of the decimated industries, the situation is much more dire. 

However, it seems like right now most agencies have seen a handful of client pauses, reductions or cancellations. At Square 2, it's been a small group, less then we can count on one hand. The bigger issue has been new business. It’s out there and we’re talking to prospects, but rightly so, people are slow to move forward.

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Topics: digital agency strategy, Response to Covid-19

In Full Transparency: What's Going On At Square 2?

Posted by Mike Lieberman on Mar 22, 2020 10:30:00 AM

Now More Than Ever, We Need Real Information From Real Agencies

Over the past few weeks, I’ve sat in on several agency consultants’ webinars on the future of our industry. Most of them are filled with worst-case scenarios that include cutting staff, hoarding cash, working for free and taking any business just to stay working.

All these ideas are solid and designed to challenge us to make the hard decisions that might be required to keep our businesses open.

But if we’re encouraging our clients to push through then shouldn’t we push through too?

Here’s exactly what’s going on at Square 2, so you also have insights from someone who still has an agency to run.

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Topics: agency operations, Response to Covid-19

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