6 Reasons Why Your Agency Isn't Developing

The industry is growing. Is your agency budding with it?

If your agency is festering or shrinking, you can detect a few operational or strategic errors to correct. Yet these mistakes often refuge larger fundamental mistakes.

If your agency doesn't recognize and cure ground rules, any changes around the edges aren't going to make the situation better.

Here Are 6 Reasons Why Your Agency Isn’t Growing

1) Your Focus is on Revenue & Not Profitability

Revenue is important. You have to pay bills, remunerate your employees. But focusing on revenue to the marginalization of whether your agency is actually profitable tweaks you in some bad directions.

Here's a distinctive scenario: You want money to generate. The agency says "yes" to any company whose good enough just for the money. Now your team is stressed thin. No client is getting your best output. As a result, your agency grieves from high rates of client and employee agitate. Making you anxious to find more clients. So you again say "yes" to anyone who's good for the money.

This is a never-ending vicious circle.

Instead, simplify what types of clients and work can provide revenue and profit. Comprehend metrics like the lifetime worth of each client and your agency's cost to acquire a client. Figure out which client accounts are costing you time and resources that can't be advanced in your growth.

2) Business Development Responds to Everyone

Your business development team is wasting time and agency resources by returning to all inquiries. Not everyone is a good fit. How well established is your client screening process? Improve it to a better channel where your agency invests its client procurement resources.

This doesn't mean disregard inquiries by companies who don’t fit well. That's just impolite and unprofessional.

When you see they're not a good fit, let them know you're not the right agency for them. If you can make some associations for them with a few other agencies that are better matched, even better. You never know who they know, so make them feel positive about your agency. This is what leads to future referrals.

3) Project Management & Not Just Growth

Account managers have a tough job, no doubt. But they must wear different hats well. How does your agency hold account managers responsible? Are they mainly, or only, adjudicated on their ability to drive deadlines, timely and accurate reporting, and attaining campaign goals?

Your account managers are your finest eyes and ears into a client's business and requirements. They should be able to identify where your opportunities to cultivate the account are. Don't reflect it a valuable extra if an account manager is active about getting more budget from a client or being able to develop them into a retainer agreement. Leading, rather than managing, clients is essential for the job.

If this isn't the philosophy yet for your account managers, you must start including growth metrics in their performance evaluations and appraisals.

4) You Don't Take Your Own Medicine

 How well do you market your business? Do you have strong marketing goals and strategies for your own agency? Treat your business development team like a client. You don't get to thrust the work scheduled to be done for them aside for a more important client. Well, you can but not if you want to grow.

5) Lack of Process and Structure

Lack of structure results in countless direct costs, as well opportunity costs. You might see it emerging up at your firm in different other ways.

For instance, you don't use a time management system. Not just have it installed. You don't really know how much time different chores and campaigns take. Now you face additional cost and have to discount invoices. Maybe there is work done that gets lost in the slouch and never gets billed at all.

Maybe your lack of structure shows up in unpredictable quality of work. You aren't using effective collaboration tools, templates, or outlined workflows to get work done. As a result, the process gets ignored. Corners are cut to meet deadlines. Work suffers and clients eventually leave.

6) Agency Grow Only With the Evolving Creatives

Your agency can only offer services where the different teams have expertise. If you aren't growing the skills of your employees, the space of services your agency can provide will get reduced.

This doesn't mean every agency has to be proficient in every different digital marketing method, or that every member needs to be a jack-of-all-trades. But the tactics, tools, and quirks of digital marketing are continually changing.

Provide support and openings for your employees and stable of outworkers to grow their skills. You'll limit your toss and have a constantly renewable resource of creativity.

You don't need to be the leading agency to be the agency you want to be. Nonetheless, you do need to grow in spaces that fit your agency's profile and aims. Else you will be never able to create the agency you want it to be.