s your agency struggling to maintain growth, profitability, and a happy, creative workforce? I have been in that position a few times. As a corporate marketer, I was quite naive when I started my agency. We were going to over-deliver with clients, I was going to pay my employees well, and the business was going to grow at a moderate pace – proving to the world that our business model was the best agency model ever.
That didn’t happen. Instead, the last 10 years have been quite the roller coaster for our agency’s health. We’ve been highly profitable at times and had a few very scary lean times as well. Five years ago, I even thought about closing the doors until I was bailed out with a business loan from a colleague.
Health is an all-encompassing term that I use in referring to overall client satisfaction, employee satisfaction, profitability, growth, and scalability. When we first opened the agency, we had the following goals:
- Provide an incredible amount of flexibility to our clients to achieve superior marketing results for them.
- Provide maximum flexibility to our employees to maximize their productivity and creativity.
- Charge a fair market value for the work (which happens to be quite a good rate since we’re in the Midwest).
The roller coaster didn’t begin immediately; I was flush with amazing clients who valued our strategies and our experience in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) space. In fact, it may even have been a curse to open the doors like that. In the years that followed, an illness crept in that almost buried us: Flexibility was abused by a few clients, which cost us time, energy, and began to erode all of our internal and external relationships. Employees thrived as long as business was good and their incomes and benefits were substantial. When the business suffered and hours became long, they grew resentful and looked elsewhere for opportunities. A fair market value for the work was not enough to cover the losses of client abuse, employee turnover, and client turnover.
As a result of this difficulty, we wrote a manifesto that has brought our agency back to life:
- Agency First: Respect for the business, discipline to set expectations, and to achieve superior results with unapologetic service cost are essential. It’s not the client first or the employee first, it’s the health of the agency that comes first. When the agency is healthy, we can provide superior service to our clients and employees.
- Service Versus Support: We provide a service for our clients, but we do not provide support. This is an enormous expectation that must be set with your clients. Our service advances our clients through their agile marketing journey, focused on the end results and key performance indicators of their business. Support shifts our focus to short-term emergencies and emails where we’re valued on our responsiveness rather than building our client’s business results.
- Value-Based Reporting: Our bi-weekly meetings and weekly reports are totally focused on our client’s goals, not the tasks that we complete for them. Our reporting reflects this, providing campaign results, and trending data for everything from awareness to customer experience depending on the strategies we’re deploying.
- Productized Selling: We don’t sell stuff. We make certain that our clients fully recognize and acknowledge that they are paying for our expertise and experience. We watch far too many companies fail because they maximize output without a strategy for producing actual results. In fact, we’ve often found that higher engagement, acquisition, and retention come with less stuff and more remarkable initiatives that require research, integration, automation, and promotion aside from their execution.
It’s not a surprise that as we’ve reset expectations for clients over the years and shifted our priorities, our profitability and growth continue to improve. Because of that, our employees are allowed more creative control, are less stressed, and are more satisfied overall. Best of all, our clients respect the results that we’re achieving for their business.
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