Selling creative services is unlike any other industry. This means we face our own unique challenges and the opportunities are uncommon to almost every other business type. Yet there is an opaqueness in our trade and by removing this, we can become more efficient, more effective and ultimately more profitable.
Recently a comment was made by one of our Creative Mastermind members, that “agencies should chat more, talking about the things that matter in our businesses”. And I agree wholeheartedly! But as an agency owner myself, I would not have been standing in their office sharing my secretive and sensitive business information. Nor would they allow me to see the inner workings of their business if I was a threat to it.
I say this, yet some of my most trusted partners in business were those agencies I was directly competing against. By sharing knowledge and information across our studios we were able to reduce risk, provide support in areas where each other had strengths and give each other the knowledge and confidence to raise prices in line with market expectations.
In our conversation, it became clear that our programme member undervalued a core part of their service when compared to the market expectations, but charged more in their area of perceived core competency. Having this discussion alone was invaluable to gain an understanding of weaknesses in their business.
But this conversation prompted a significant challenge we as agency owners face. We’re generally a secretive bunch and we don’t like people knowing our business. So how can we share knowledge on the challenges and the opportunities we collectively face, without giving away who we are or it being used against us?
Shining a spotlight on agency
I gave consideration to my previous conversation for quite some time, before deciding that an industry benchmark would be a great way to build out our collective knowledge. During 2024 I’ll be reaching out to hundreds of agency owners right across the UK, Ireland a further afield. In doing so, I aim to invite each owner to complete our creative industry benchmark.
It will be a completely confidential questionnaire and I’ll compile the results to share with those who have provided their own insights.
The amibition of the project is that we’ll be able to collectively raise the bar across our industry and provide relevant information that will collectively benefit each contributor. While each of our creative studios is unique, we all face commionality in the questions we need answered to make our respective businesses more efficient.
The questionnaire will cover each of the core functions in our agencies and I’ll be engaging with many owners prior to setting the questionnaire live, to ensure we provide a comprehensive question set. If you have any questions you’d like to benchmark, just get let me know.
Sign up for the benchmark
To sign up for the industry benchmark, please fill in the form below. Please know that this database will be used exclusively for this project. I won’t be marketing to this list outside of the provision of the questionnaire and final response.
The following criteria will be set to ensure its relevance to the markets we operate in:
- Conducted throughout 2024
- Exclusively UK & Ireland based agencies
- Agency leaders only – including founders, owners, directors or other management roles
- Many types of agencies (creative, web development, PR, etc.)
- Agencies size is not a restriction