I recently keynoted a conference on UX and before and after taking the stage I made a point of asking as many of your clients the same very specific questions about how they hire agencies. Two newer trends quickly became apparent, and it would be good to keep these in mind.
You’ve had some new business success recently and now it’s time to staff for it. You might be too quick to hire people, and when you do hire, you may be hiring the wrong ones. So let’s see if I can help you out a little with some principles that might preserve the momentum at your agency and keep you out of trouble:
What do you do with smaller clients, especially the legacy ones? The acquisition cost is behind you, but should they occupy a spot on the roster? It's one thing to hire for additional capacity when you land a new client, but there's also a good argument for cleaning out your client base and freeing up existing capacity first.
Start by getting all the data together that you need, which is primarily cost accounting. If principals and key leaders aren't participating in the timekeeping system, estimate their time to cover that. This is important because legacy clients have outsized relationships with principals because of the way accounts were handled in the past, before you grew. Next, score each client in five categories:
Most of you would like a prospect--in the early stages--to assume that working with you will be a fit. Then you want the opportunity to move them along during the sales process until the check clears. You don't want them making any early decisions on their own, deciding that it's not a good fit, possibly, and looking for a different firm to work with.
We know this is true by looking at your website, which is welcoming, friendly, and sometimes full of those faux tests that help a prospect determine the fit. "Here, take this four question test and see if we should work together: First, do you want a true partnership. Second, do you want good value for your money. Third, do you want quick results. Fourth, do you want lasting results." And then, after a drum roll, they learn that it's a good fit! Surprise, surprise.
Your website should help a prospect make an honest decision about whether it's a good fit to work with you, and they should do this on their own, before they ever talk to you, for these two reasons...
There's nothing quite like an empty pipeline to get your attention, right? In those times, panic overcomes inertia and you find the time to do the marketing. But what about the long periods between those bouts of panic when you push your marketing to the back burner and joke about the cobbler's son who never has any decent shoes? What's a realistic amount of time to spend on your own marketing? Here are seven ideas to get more with less of your time:
I recently did some repeat consulting for a client, and I was surprised at how little things had changed since I worked with them a few years back. Working with any advisor is a painful process, but it's designed to be a good investment rather than a fair bit of pain for just a little bit of gain.
She initiated the re-engagement, so I presumed that I wasn't blamed for the lack of progress, but I can't help the introspection. Did I misread her situation? Did I not work hard enough to suggest a solution that she could realistically implement? Was everything good except that I wasn't present enough during the implementation period?
Each of those reasons has been true at one time or another in a consulting career that spans decades, but it's rare and I nearly always catch it in time and make it right, where appropriate. This time, though, I decided to chart out the simple...but profound...reasons why change might not take root at your firm. Why you keep trying different things and can never seem to get rid of those weights that keep you from soaring above the average firm around you. Why you might wonder if you should call it quits and go work for someone else, and maybe make more money with...
Years ago, when I still owned my agency, I went to work one Sunday afternoon so that I could get something done without the usual interruptions. I was anxious to catch up on our billing because receivables were dropping as clients paid and I needed to turn some WIP (work in progress) into some AR (accounts receivable). I hated the accounting nature of that part of my job, but it felt so good to generate $100,000 of invoices in just a few minutes.
I finished and felt like I'd accomplished something. I was satisfied because I was suddenly caught up, in this one thing, for this short time. It almost felt like I'd earned all that money in a few minutes!
But not for long. That next morning I started the week off and I kept thinking about how high our high receivables balance was! When would some of that client money start coming in? I knew why it was high--I'd just bumped them up to that level the day before--and I knew that none of it was due yet, but I could see this underlying anxiety in myself. Yesterday it was because receivables where low; today it was because they were high. Crazy.
Do you see that in yourself? Always worried about something? It's a curse and a blessing, really. You're never satisfied. You never rest for long. It's always this or that on your list of tasks:
Most of you hate timekeeping. You hate doing it and you hate enforcing it (see an eight-part sliding plan to do just that).
There's very little scientific connection, too, between profitable firms and firms that are religious about tracking all of their time. So these are the only times when you need to stay on top of it:
At the end of this piece I'll share why I'm nervous to admit this, but for now let me just say that your job running an agency really is different than running another kind of firm. There are two reasons for that.
I love it when an agency tells me about their sophisticated clients. They make an agency better primarily for four reasons:
You are very smart people, and so I can make some bullet-point observations without much explanation and still be helpful to you. Read these and see if they ring true to you:
I consult with one new agency every week through our TBR, and a question that comes up regularly is how to transition a new client from the sales team to the account team. Here's how to do it well.
