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 […]
How To Scale Your Design Agency In 4 Steps
In business, there is a certain commonality in the opportunities and challenges we face. It’s common for people to want to scale their agency or business. It’s also common for agency owners to face similar challenges when doing so. Scaling an agency is no easy task. I took my agency from zero to 20k months, […]
Time Management For Agency Owners – The 3 D’s and an A
As our agencies grow, we move further away from the tasks we enjoy or those that once made our agency successful. Instead, our days become filled with meetings about meetings, company issues take priority and days merge into weeks then months without us feeling like we’ve accomplished anything of value to the business. We monitor […]
When to bring creatives into the selling process
There’s a certain comfort in having a Creative Director or Senior Developer sitting at your side when pitching to a client. I’ll be honest, even I, who can confidently discuss brand or development projects, often used my team to support me in meetings. Our less experienced sales team would have done so much more frequently. […]
What Is The Business Diagnostic?
Knowing the current state of your business, defining its strategic objectives, and your own aspirations is critical to successful growth planning, the primary outcome of your Creative Mastermind membership. As part of our onboarding process, we’ll conduct an extensive business diagnostic with our strategists to better understand where your business is today. This allows us […]