Best Practices For Agency Stability
Oct 28, 2024Something we’re very proud of at Advocation is that we don’t just consult with agencies, but we roll up our sleeves and work alongside our clients to build the modern best practices that agencies of the future need today.
Over the years, we’ve seen firsthand that the firms that create systems focused on stability are the ones most primed to handle (almost) any challenge that comes their way.
Here are the top best practices we help firms deploy to build sustainability within their teams.
Master Capacity Planning
Capacity planning is all about resource management, and the most valuable resource within an agency is the team’s time. Mastering capacity planning is essentially keeping track of the agency’s time inventory and understanding the time available for both client and company projects. Mastering this system and skill is critical to effectively:
Manage the hiring of new staff and contractors. Agency leaders must know when to scale up or scale down their workforce to keep up with growth and manage through lulls. When capacity is managed effectively alongside financials and a sales pipeline, new team members can be brought on to the team before existing employees are over capacity and overwhelmed. On the flip side, capacity planning also ensures that leaders are looking ahead at future forecasted capacity and focused on sales growth and bringing on new clients when utilization rates are low. Effectively managing capacity allows for these flags to be detected before profits dip into the red.
Fulfill client needs on time and on budget. Ensuring that the team’s most critical resources are available to meet the needs of each client is the most basic premise of workflow management, but often something that often gets overlooked. This practice becomes increasingly challenging to master as the agency grows. Once a firm has a handful of full-time employees, it’s usually time to launch a tool to help track and manage capacity. Teamwork.com is one of our favorite resources for this, as they’ve explicitly optimized for agency workflows.
Manage the overall profitability of the business. If capacity is properly managed within an agency, it’s hard not to make a healthy profit margin. Simply put, if a firm is overstaffed, it will lose money because money in (paying clients) isn’t balanced with the money going out (employee salaries). Being overstaffed is the most common profit leak we find when working with an agency, and the bulk of our work goes to finding opportunities to streamline workflows, improve accuracy in capacity planning, and increase delivery margins on client work.
Constantly Evolve
While we work with agencies in various disciplines, each faces the constant evolution of trends, media landscapes, digital platforms, and industry best practices. Getting comfortable with evolution is necessary for any firm to stay in business. There are a few key places where agencies must consistently audit for opportunities to develop and improve.
Service offerings. The most successful agency owners evaluate which services should be retired and which should be added at least once a year. Agencies often hold on to services that are either unprofitable or no longer add value to the client and team for way too long. When auditing current services, simple questions leaders can ask themselves include:
- Is the service profitable? Are we making money from executing it, and if not, is there a good reason for us to keep offering it?
- Does this service provide value to the client? Could it be more valuable?
- Does this service provide value to the team?
- How does this service impact the reputation of the firm?
- What percentage of our revenue comes from offering this service? Does that correlate appropriately with how many resources go to marketing, selling, and executing it?
One of the most challenging services for creative agencies is social media. We dive into how agency owners approach social media as a service here.
Training programs. Agencies must train up their teams as new platforms, software, trends, and best practices emerge. Often, how agencies train their teams is also relevant. For example, in this digital age, brown bag “lunch and learns” have been replaced with webinars. For firms seeking to revamp training programs for the modern workforce, we dive into everything we have learned about creating professional development programs with women and minorities in mind here.
Technology stack. Technology should streamline agency operations, not complicate it. However, with endless options on the market, it can be overwhelming to know which tools are worth the investment. We share the tools we love for agency teams and the best practices for using them in this post.
Focus on Client Retention
Acquiring new clients requires a lot of time and resources. While new client acquisition is certainly important, most agencies overlook the importance of maintaining and even expanding services with current clients. Both are valuable.
Agency leaders should focus on forming long-term strategic partnerships with the clients they serve by understanding the client’s overall goals and objectives and continuously showing up in a way that supports those goals. Two core processes that support client retention the most include:
Reporting. The goal of reporting should be to show the client how the firm’s results map back to the client’s goals and objectives. This is the team’s chance to show its value, improving its standing as a long-term partner.
Setting and maintaining expectations. One of the most common reasons for a client to part ways with an agency is because of unmet expectations, and more often than not, that is because they were never clearly communicated in the first place.
Another great way to create lasting client relationships is to look for ways to add additional value to clients. This should be a part of client relationship management and a core part of any agency’s new business plan. Most firms we work with have secured anywhere between 10% to 50%+ of year-over-year growth by expanding their value to current clients.
Stability within an agency is the key to successfully navigating any challenges that arise, whether that be a pandemic, an economic downturn, or a sudden change in employees.
If you’d like to learn more from the Advocation team on best practices for PR & marketing agency teams, follow us on social media–Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube.