Would you like to grow your agency?
Agency growth is a tough challenge but can also be a rewarding journey when done successfully. Let me take you on a journey and share the best strategies, frameworks, and tools I used to grow an agency with millions per year. When you want to dive in quickly, I can highly recommend you to read Million Dollar Consulting from Alan Weiss.
How do you sell agency services?
The biggest problem that agencies have is not their quality of work. They are passionate about their work, but they don’t know how to sell. In consulting agencies, I’ve seen selling their services as their biggest consistent problem. Consequently, they don’t know what they are “really” selling. But what are you selling? You’re either selling one of the following outcomes:
- Extra Revenue
- Reduced costs
- Prevention of mistake
- Increased valuation with a better infrastructure
- Capability transfer
1. Extra Revenue
When you’re selling online marketing, almost every company buys that service for you because it helps them make more revenue. Therefore, the first thing you need to do is connect your services to extra that you’re generating for your clients.
2. Reduced costs
In many cases, it’s wiser to hire an expert instead of doing the job yourself. Instead, many companies make the mistake of first figuring it out alone before bringing in an expert. Consequently, they pay a lot of “learning expenses.” As a result, it takes them longer to complete the job and lower quality.
3. Prevention of mistakes
When they hire you as an agency, you should be helping your clients to make less mistakes. You know what could go wrong in your field. Therefore, helping your clients not make these mistakes is valuable.
4. Increased valuation with a better infrastructure
When hired as a growth consultant, I always make sure that the company infrastructure becomes better because of my presence. For example, a company with a better website will sell more today and tomorrow because of my help. Consequently, the company owners can sell their company at a higher valuation. Most importantly, a company that can sell is just worth more money. Therefore it’s your job as an agency to help your clients achieve this status.
5. Capability transfer
Always make the situation of your client better and share your knowledge. Firstly, many consultants and agencies are too afraid to share their knowledge. They want a client that’s dependent on them. Consequently, clients leave you because they don’t wish to dependencies. Secondly, when you’re the one sharing knowledge with your client, you will, as a result, be hired more. So your job is to make them better!
Where do most agencies struggle in scaling up their agency growth?
When you grow an agency, it’s all about building the right “pyramid.” In other words, you need to have the right balance between junior, mediors, and senior experts in your agency. In my years of running an agency, I’ve analyzed where team members at a certain level struggle. For example, junior people think they know strategy way too early, but senior people lose touch with the operations. Therefore they only know the tricks from a couple of years ago but don’t have dirty hands anymore.
I’ve written in detail about my struggles and success in my book. You can get this story on how I grew my agency in my book: Structuring for Extreme Revenue Growth.
How can you grow an agency in the most sustainable way possible?
Successful agency growth is a combination of short- and long-term strategies. What you need to understand profoundly is the fact that you’re operating in a people business. There’s a war for talent, but you also want to ensure that the best players stay with you.
A-Players vs B-Players
The best people work differently compared to the less performing people. When you want to have the best agency possible, you need to ensure that the best stay and least performing team members leave or improve.
You need to work on the business instead of in the businesss
Most agency owners and managers stay too much in the day-to-day. As a result, they are being sucked into stressful projects, lose the overview, and agency growth stalls. I’ve seen this so many times, and it’s killing for your agency growth. Therefore you need to find a way to work on the business instead of in the business. In my Agency Growth Consulting, you get all my processes, tools, and mindset to work on the business instead of in the business.
What’s the fastest way in agency growth?
The only way that you can use to grow an agency fast is by having structure. You need to have a structure in all your processes and make an impact. For example, when every project is done randomly, instead of following a process, you’re screwed. But when you work with strong processes, you have something that will help you scale. In my book Structuring for Extreme Revenue Growth, I show exactly what you need to do when you want to have a structure that delivers a strong impact.
Agency Growth: Building in public
Make sure to come back often to this page, as I will regularly update this page. When you want to get help to get the most out of agency growth, feel free to visit my Agency Growth Consulting page. I’ve helped many agency owners with one-on-one coaching and trained many agency teams.
