The reason you can’t sell design
With a hand on my heart I can tell you that design is one of the hardest services to sell. We sell dreams, promises and visual representations that in isolation are worth less than the paper they may one day be printed on. And I don’t say this lightly as these are the collective thoughts […]
3 tips to increase your productivity as an agency owner
As agency owners, the input and influence we impart on our studio is often far greater than it should be. For the longest time, I was the “oracle”, or rather I believed myself to be. In the real world, we are often the bottleneck, holding things up due to our inexperience or inefficiency. Dare I […]
Design Agency Sales Strategies: Social Selling
In the agency world, I’m somewhat of an anomaly. I’m not a designer and I am most certainly not a developer. Anything that remotely looks like creativity in my work is through osmosis of working with hundreds of talented creatives over nearly 2 decades. However, I am and always will be a student of business […]
How to grow a design agency in 2024
If I were looking to grow a design agency next year, here are the top 5 things I’d do now to give my business the best opportunity for growth. Step 1 – Love the ones you’re with It’s always easier to keep a customer than to find a new one. If we can retain 80% […]
Creative agency margins: What should they be?
As a creative agency owner profit was always on my mind. If our margins were good, we’d make a profit and like every business, this is the key to success. But being an agency owner, we often work in isolation away from our competitors. I spoke with a client last week who commented that creative […]
Setting revenue targets for your agency
As ambitious creative entrepreneurs, we rarely want to take a step backwards in business and if we’re completely honest with ourselves, a step back means “making less money”. With ever-increasing costs of doing business, even staying the same can take money from our pockets. With this in mind, it should be a primary focus for […]
5 Ways To Supercharge Your Agency’s Growth
There are very few agency owners who say that they don’t want to grow their business. Uncommon yes, non-existent, definitely not. Yet I’d argue, that in today’s market, even to stand still we need to grow. In many agencies, costs are up, and profit is stagnating or falling, but it doesn’t have to be that […]
How to Get More Clients on a Monthly Retainer
When you’re trying to scale your agency, putting time, resources and focus into its growth, seeing the revenue rise and fall each month can cause huge stress. No matter how much effort you put in, business planning is harder and often a best guess without a predictable revenue stream. I’ve worked with agencies who have […]
Social Selling: Selling Design Without Cold Calling
There’s not one agency owner, sales manager or business development executive I know who would turn down the opportunity of selling design without cold calling. For many of us, the sales process gives us the ick. It’s a dirty word! I’ll also go out on a limb here and say that many salespeople are getting […]
8 Tips To Grow Your Agency Fast
Growing an agency is rarely easy and more often than not it takes considerable time and effort to achieve any measurable growth. We need to find clients, offer them a service, achieve results and maintain these results as we bring on other clients. Then we’ll need a team to support these new clients and processes […]