How to accelerate your agency’s growth in the year ahead

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Webinar presented live on October 9, 2024

As agency leaders start to think about annual planning, most will be looking toward accelerating their growth rates – especially if the past 12 months haven’t been as robust as hoped.

In this webinar, Chip Griffin provides you with simple steps to take to get started on mapping out a plan that maximizes the chances for faster growth in the year ahead.

He identifies approaches that he has seen work well – in addition to potential pitfalls to avoid – based on his own experience as an owner coupled with many years of advising agencies of all sizes.

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The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Hello and welcome to today’s SAGA webinar on how to accelerate your agency’s growth in the year ahead. I’m your host, Chip Griffin. I’m the founder of SAGA, the Small Agency Growth Alliance, and I’m looking forward to a good conversation around a topic that I know is on the minds of a lot of you as we’re in the fourth quarter of of 2024 as we present this today.

And so you’re starting in many cases to think about what 2025 looks like putting together budgets and plans, thinking about how you want to make some changes to your business. And so we’re going to talk at a very high level about how I would encourage you to think about those 12 to 15 months that are in front of you and how you can put together a plan to get the results that you want.

Before we jump into the topic at hand, and while people are continuing to filter into the webinar here at the top of the hour, I’ll go through a couple of quick housekeeping items. And so, first of all, I should tell you that there will be a replay available, so you don’t need to take meticulous notes.

You will be able to go back and re watch this if you like. Obviously, if you’re watching this on replay already, you know that. But if you’re here live, you can also use the Q& A function to ask questions. Feel free to submit your question at any time during the course of today’s webinar, and I will take all of the questions at the end of the prepared presentation.

If you’re watching this on replay, you can feel free to email me at chip@sagaimpact.com, and I’ll be happy to try to answer any follow up questions you might have from the content that I provide today. And you can also use it even if you are watching live, if you think of something after the fact, or you just have a question that you’d prefer not to share publicly. If you discuss this webinar on social media, I’d love it if you use the hashtag agency leadership just to make it a little bit easier to discover. And finally, any of the resources that I mentioned today as well as plenty of others are available at sagaimpact.com. Just use the search function at the top of the page and you will be able to find a resource on pretty much any topic that you can think of related to small agencies and if you can’t find it use the ask chip function to ask and I’ll probably create some content Because you’re probably not the only one who has that very question.

So, now let’s jump into the actual topic at hand and what we’re going to be covering today. The first thing I’ll be doing is touching on some big picture principles that you need to think about when you’re thinking about putting together a growth plan for your agency.

I’ll offer some practical suggestions on how you can actually implement those and what you might be thinking about doing in order to grow both revenue and more importantly profits. And finally, I’ll talk about some potential pitfalls, things to be wary of, make sure that you don’t stumble into things that either I’ve done personally or that I know other agency owners have, because why not learn from everyone else’s mistakes rather than having to learn it the hard way yourself.

So the first thing that I would say to you is that you need to start by focusing on yourself. And so what do I mean by that? The very first thing you need to do is thinking about what you want from your business. And I, this is something I talk about quite often because far too many agency owners are operating, not necessarily on autopilot, but they’re doing what they’re what is expected of them, what they believe is the next thing that they should do, what the best practice is, and ultimately you need to start from a position of understanding what you want from your own business.

How much do you want to make? How much flexibility do you want to have in the time that you’re spending? How much time do you want to work on the business? What kind of work do you want to be doing? If you can define those things, define your role and the rewards that you’re getting out of the business, That’s the best starting point.

And this is something that you should be reflecting on at least annually, or whenever there’s a major life event, something that causes you to take a fresh look at the relationship between yourself and your business. And if you do that, it will help you to make better business decisions that give you a higher level of satisfaction.

And I can tell you that the best performing agencies I know typically have agency owners who are satisfied with what they’re getting and what they’re doing. So start there. Start by being just a little bit selfish. to figure those things out. And part of this is figuring out what you want to change.

What are the things that you want to have be different for you next year? It might be making more money, it might be working less, it might be having more time to go to family events, whatever it is, you need to define it. But it also might be on the work side. It might be that you want to spend less time on client service, or you want to free up time to work on business development, or you want to be able to spend your time more strategically and less tactically. Whatever those things are, you need to put this together because this is part of the big picture of what you’re coming up with in order to get the focus for yourself set. Once you’ve got that squared away, now is where we talk about what you were probably coming into this webinar expecting more of, which is focusing on what you do with the agency, how you actually adjust the course for your business in order to get that growth that you’re looking for in the year ahead.

And so you need to start by thinking about what is your agency’s focus. And far too many agencies consider themselves full service agencies who will work with anybody. And anytime they’re asked to do something they try to come up with an additional way to provide that service. You need to have a focus to your business.

It needs to be focused on who you serve, how you serve them, and what results that you produce. And so take a fresh look at that. And the first step in that, when you’re reviewing this for an existing agency, is to ask yourself how you can simplify things. And this isn’t just in terms of your targeting. It starts with asking these key questions.

Should you narrow your services? And I’m not saying that every agency, everyone listening to me today should. But you need to go through the list of services that you claim to provide or actually provide to your clients. And you need to ask yourself, should you be doing that still? You may also want to be expanding it, but we’ll get to that in a later portion of today’s webinar.

Start by eliminating those things that you either can’t do profitably, that you can’t do effectively, that you can’t do because you don’t, or you can do but you don’t enjoy doing them and your team doesn’t enjoy doing them. You really need to have a suite of services that you’re offering that are desired by your clients, but also that allow you to produce the results both financial and for the client that you need in order to be successful.

So the simplification process is sort of a cleaning house that I would encourage you to do as the start of your planning process before you start layering in and adding additional things. Because normally when you think growth your first thing to do is say, okay, what, what are the new services I need to offer that can generate revenue?

What are the new business development tactics that I can do? What are the new people that I can add to my team? You need to be a little bit more introspective first and take a look at what you can eliminate before you start adding anything. Because sometimes When you do that, you will see a clearer path forward because you’re freeing up resources, you’re freeing up mindshare to be able to zero in on those things that have the best results for both your clients and your business.

And you really need to remember that you only want to offer those things that you do really well. Even if you have every client that you have asking for a particular service, if you can’t do it well, don’t offer it just to check that box. Now you may want to partner with somebody so that you can provide an integrated solution for your clients so that they only have to deal with a single point of contact.

Maybe it only even a single payment source. If you’re happy to manage payments to that other provider, but don’t go out and add something simply because clients are asking for it. If you’re asked to manage Facebook ads and you’re not good at it. Don’t do it. It will hurt your reputation. It will be unprofitable in the end, and it potentially will cost you the business that you already do well.

So as you’re doing this narrowing process, take a really critical look at those things that you struggle to produce the results that your clients are expecting. And remember, you need to think of this in terms of what your client expects. You can’t simply say, well, I know I’m doing as good a job as I can, or I’m doing a good job.

If your client is not perceiving it, then it doesn’t matter. And so think about that in terms of how you’re paring back your services for the year ahead. It’s not just the services though, you also want to think about who you’re targeting. And I talked earlier about how a lot of agencies are just claiming to be full service and will work with anybody who comes through the door.

And you really need to think about how you can lean on the experience that you have as an agency and as an agency owner, because your past experience often matters as well, particularly if your agency may be only say three to five years old, the things that you’ve done in the past are particularly relevant, but even 20 years into owning your agency, your own personal background, if you own a small agency is still going to be very important, and so you need to think about the kinds of businesses that you’ve served, and so you need to think about Are you as well focused, as well targeted as you can be, or should you be eliminating some of the places that you are?

For example, If you say that I specialize in automotive and technology and pharmaceuticals and manufacturing, you’ve got a huge breadth of things there, some of which overlaps and some of which doesn’t. You need to think about how you can tailor that down. And you’ll find in the SAGA resources a lot of things about how to find your focus as an agency. So if you type and find your focus into the search box, you will find webinars and articles and podcast episodes that will help you walk through this in more detail so we don’t have to spend a lot of time on it today, but really think about that and really think about how you can reduce your target market that you’re serving so that you can truly be a specialist.

Because specialists are the ones who succeed. Specialist agencies are the ones that people identify and say, I need to work with these folks because they under, they get me. But it’s also important because it makes your job easier. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You don’t have to have your team relearn a new industry every time a new client comes on.

If you work with similar types of businesses or similar industries or really similar problem sets that your clients have, all of those things contribute to you being more efficient and more effective. If you’re a PR agency, you build some media lists and you’re able to reuse them because you’re targeting similar members of the media for your client base. If you’re selling PPC ads or doing SEO, you understand the business, you understand the search terms, you understand the clients and how they’re going to be responding to them, the, your client’s clients, that is. And so the more that you understand about the business, the better those results are, the less time you spend learning, which means you get faster results for clients.

And it also means that you waste less time, i. e. you generate more profit because you’re not ramping up and continuously having to learn something brand new every time you work with a new client. So be that specialist, be the person that prospects and clients lean on because you understand them, you speak their language, you know their problems and you understand how to solve them.

But now let’s, we’ve talked about reducing services. We’ve talked about reducing the number of targets that you have. Let’s talk about business development tactics, because this is another area that typically, and many of you tuning in may be thinking, I’m just going to give you a list of things that you should do more of.

And we’ll, we’ll talk about some of the things that you probably should do more of. But first, again, take a look at your current suite of business development tactics. And you should really be thinking about business development in a couple of different key ways. The first thing that you need to have in mind is that your goal should be to being helpful. It’s not to sell.

You are not selling widgets. You are not out there creating the master sales process. And I know a lot of agencies like to talk about the sales funnel and all of that. But at the end of the day, when it comes to agency business development, the key ingredients for most of you is going to be that you need to find a way to be helpful, to be seen as being helpful.

And that means providing resources, providing time, talking to people, whether that’s at events or one on one, because ultimately your goal for business development really should be to have meaningful conversations. The more meaningful conversations that you have, with prospects, or people who can refer prospective clients, the more likely you are to have success.

So whether you’re hosting webinars, or creating blog posts, or hosting a podcast, or doing cold outreach, or posting on LinkedIn, ultimately your goal for all of those things should be that you’re having meaningful conversations with people that you want to be talking with, that you want to be building relationships with.

And so you should be measuring the success of your business development tactics by that meaningful conversations metric. Well, what is a meaningful conversation? A meaningful conversation, it doesn’t necessarily need to be a sales pitch or a going through what your capabilities deck is, or any of those kinds of things.

It’s substantive conversations that allow you to share your expertise that allows the person on the other end of that conversation to understand what you do, not necessarily in excruciating detail or in a sales oriented format, but they get you, they understand who you serve, what you do and how you make a difference.

And if you’re doing that on a regular basis, you will be building that network of people that will at the right moment in time be able to talk with you about an actual opportunity. Because ultimately business development in the agency world is right place, right time. You can talk to the most qualified prospect in the world, but if they’re not in need of an agency at a particular moment in time, then you are not going to have success.

So you need to find a way to continue to be helpful with them, to them, to have meaningful conversations with them, and then when they are ready, or when they have someone who comes to them and says, Hey, I’m looking for this kind of agency, they will think of you because you have remained top of mind through all of these tactics that you’re doing.

So as you’re thinking about winnowing down your suite of business development tactics as an agency, as part of your cleaning house for the start of the new year, you should be thinking about are the things that you’re doing achieving these goals. And so you need to ask what’s working. And the flip, what isn’t working?

Because it’s very easy to accumulate a whole bunch of different things. Maybe someone told you that you should be posting on LinkedIn a few times a week, so you start doing that. Maybe someone else told you that you should have an email newsletter, so you took a stab at that. Maybe someone else told you that you should be a podcast guest, so you hired a PR agency to help get you on various podcasts.

Evaluate all of the things that you’re doing today and ask if they’re working or not. If they aren’t working, is there something that you could easily change to perhaps see results out of it? And I’ll tell you what the key thing is that causes most agency business development tactics to fail in just a moment.

But ask yourself if there’s something obvious that you could change to give it another go. If not, maybe it’s something that you want to set aside. But the other factor that you need to think about when you’re assembling your list of business development tactics as an agency in order to grow, is What are the things that you enjoy doing as an owner most, or at least that you hate the least?

There are a lot of agency owners who dislike most aspects of business development except the, the closing conversation, the strategic piece of it, you know, the tail end of the process. The having the initial conversations, the do, you know, doing the work that it takes in order to generate those meaningful conversations.

A lot of times there is more reluctance there, and so you need to ask yourself, what are the things that you will enjoy doing the most because if you don’t enjoy doing it if you hate doing it that’s a deterrent to you doing it consistently And we’ll talk more about consistency in a minute because that is the key point that you need to consider And so if you love talking to people if you love having conversations like I am right now maybe you want to host webinars or host podcasts But if not, if that’s, if the idea of a camera or microphone in front of you is something you dread, don’t do it.

Maybe you like to write so you can create written content. Maybe you don’t like to do that, but you like to speak at events. So it’s the, it’s the camera part of the, the equation, , that bothers you. But maybe you like to go to events and either speak to large groups, small groups, do networking.

There’s a lot of different ways that you can go about doing things, but you need to have alignment as the owner. Going back to our very first point today, that you need to tailor this plan to you and to your unique needs and interests. Because that’s how agencies are successful. They’re not successful because they followed some other person’s playbook and some other person’s plan for how they built their own successful agency.

That’s all great stuff to internalize. It’s great to listen to someone like me and what I’ve done and what works for me, but it may not be what works for you. And so you need to think about the things that you will be doing and you will be happy enough to do them that you will do them well and you will do them consistently.

So evaluate everything, whether you’re removing it or adding it, based in part on that metric. And now that you’ve gone through this list, you’ve winnowed out the things that you don’t do well, that aren’t working, that just aren’t the right fit for you going forward, now you need to start thinking about what are you going to do?

For a business development standpoint to grow. Because obviously eliminating things that in and of itself is not going to typically generate success. What you need to do is you do need to come up with some initiatives for growth that do make sense, that do fit the criteria that we’ve talked about.

Being helpful, generating meaningful conversations and being something that you are happy enough to do as an agency owner that you will stick with it. And so you should pick one thing. And I, one of the mistakes that I’ve seen quite often and that I’ve frankly done myself many times over the years is that I have too many initiatives going at one time.

And if you sit down and say, okay, in order to grow in 2025, I’m going to start doing three things. I’m going to be posting regularly on LinkedIn. I’m going to start a podcast and I’m going to start an email newsletter. It’s possible that will work. But you’re spreading yourself pretty thin there. And my suggestion to you is that you take one thing and make that your focal point and say to yourself, okay, I know that I can do this well.

And so I’m going to start this and I’m going to do it well. I’m going to do it consistently because consistency above all is the key thing. I can tell you that agencies are successful with cold outreach, with inbound, with paid ads with pretty much anything can make you successful. What makes you unsuccessful is doing them intermittently.

So I was working with an agency leader a number of years ago who launched a direct mail campaign, targeted a particular group and then the next week said, okay, well who should we target next? And of course the answer is, and anybody who’s been in direct mail knows that the answer is, you keep going after the same people until they feel like, oh my god, these people are talking to me all the time.

And you need to be thinking the same way. If you aren’t really tired of some of the tactics that you’re doing, then you probably aren’t doing them enough. It doesn’t mean again that you need to hate it, but it does mean that you need to stick with it and you need to remember that many people in your target audience are not hearing from you nearly as often as you think they are.

And we give this same advice to our clients as public relations folks, as marketers, as advertisers. But we don’t do a good job of internalizing these lessons ourselves. So we need to be consistent. We need to do one thing, and we need to do it consistently well. And only then do we think about adding one more tactic.

Now, this doesn’t mean that you can’t mix together some tools around the same thing. So for example, if I were to start hosting a podcast as an agency, it would make sense to be posting about that on LinkedIn. It would make sense to have an email newsletter that promotes it. But your core tactic, the core part of your strategy, is to have the podcast, and then the other things are in support of that.

You’re not creating a separate, newsletter, or a separate LinkedIn campaign, or those things. It’s all tied together. So you need to think about how you start with one tactic, do it well, and then gradually add additional tactics to the mix. But it’s more than just tactics. In order to be successful, in order to have a growth plan for the new year, you need to get help.

And I’m not saying, Oh my God, you need help. Maybe you do. But what you need to do is you need to look around you. And you need to ask yourself what resources that you have so that you don’t just go it alone. And one of the key things that you can do is leverage your own team. It’s quite often the case that agency owners, particularly in small agencies, will try to sit down and come up with plans on their own.

And it’s great to be sitting there and thinking about things, whether you’re driving in the car, sitting on the couch, or in the shower, wherever you come up with your big ideas, it’s great. You should absolutely do those things. But you also need to involve your team in it. And you can’t say, I want to leave my team alone because they’re already so busy with these other things.

At the end of the day, it’s good for your team if your agency is growing. And so you need to talk with them about that, help them to understand that and get their input. Ask them, bounce ideas off of them. They know you pretty well. They know your clients pretty well. If you’re thinking about making a change in your targeting, in your services that you’re providing, in your business development tactics, your team is a fantastic resource to help you with the planning process. But they’re also really good at helping you with the execution if you let them. And my encouragement to you is to treat yourself as a client. I always tell agencies this. Treat yourself as a client. Have someone, oftentimes a junior person that you’re trying to get experience in leading a client team, have them have your own agency as their client.

Have them put together a plan for the services that you provide to your clients. How can they provide some of those services for your agency itself? How does that fit into the mix? It’s a great professional development opportunity for your team. It’s a great way to experiment and test new ideas because you can control whether you say yes or no.

You don’t have to go pitch something new to a client and see if they’ll bite. So if you want to test out how podcasting works and you think you might want to use it for a client, start your own. Get to understand it, learn it, see how it works, see literally how it functions, but also the results that it provides.

You can do the same thing with LinkedIn strategies or paid ads on a particular platform or whatever it might be. You have the opportunity to experiment on yourself and your team can help you to do that and they will learn in the process as well. So take that as your very first level of help no matter what.

They’re absolutely critical. But you can look beyond the people that you pay to work for you on a day to day basis. You also have contractors who work on projects. You have partner agencies that you work with, or maybe third party providers. Talk with them, too. See what they’re seeing. Some of it may just be asking, what are you seeing out there in the current economic environment?

What are you seeing that clients and prospects are looking for or talking about? How are you seeing people , succeed on this platform or that platform. Get as much information as you can be open and talking with folks as much as you can in order to be gathering intelligence, getting ideas. And perhaps in the case of contractors and partners and even third party providers, you may find some referral opportunities there.

It could be bi directional. It could be that they send business to you. It might be that you send business to them and that generates goodwill that can help you down the road as well. So make sure that you’re thinking about all these people that you’re engaging with employees and others that you’re, you’re paying in some fashion for some kind of work or service.

They are people who can be beneficial to you as you’re putting together your growth plan and as you’re executing upon it in 2025 as well. Of course you also should be thinking about your peers. Other agency owners are sitting in the same box, in the same chair that you are. They’re going through the same challenges, they’re seeing many of the same things.

And we need to remember that the vast majority of other agencies out there are not our true competitors. And frankly, even if they are, you can still generally get some benefit from getting to know them, talking with them, having coffee, having a zoom conversation, whatever it might be to just talk things through and see where things are, how things are going, ask their own experiences, and you can learn from each other.

Your peers are an incredible resource. You can access your peers just through one on one conversations by reaching out. I’m sure you already know agency owners yourself, but certainly you can get to know additional ones through platforms like LinkedIn. You can also of course join the SAGA community on Slack or Gini’s Spin Sucks community.

These are all great places to engage with other leaders in the industry that we’re in in order to be able to better understand what’s working? What’s not? What challenges are out there? And what we’re hearing? Are we, are we hearing that business is growing, the opportunities are coming back, that, you know, clients are starting to spend?

What, what exactly are we hearing? What, how do we feel about some of the economic news that’s out there? How does some of the, the political or international stories that are out there, how is that impacting how clients think, if at all? And the more people that you talk to, the more information that you have in order to make better decisions for your growth plan.

Of course, you can work with coaches and consultants. There are lots of opportunities to do that, whether that’s someone like me or others out there. But there are also a lot of free resources that we all put out like these webinars. Most of the folks in the agency coaching and consulting community have a ton of free resources, whether that’s podcasts or webinars or articles, and you should be taking advantage of that.

from all sorts of different people, whether that’s the Agency Management Institute, my own SAGA, Karl Sakas, David C. Baker, I could go on and on about all the folks who provide lots of good things that you should be accessing and thinking about as you’re putting together your plans for the new year. And a lot of us are happy to have initial conversations with you.

I offer a free consultation, for example, and I’m happy to talk through anything you want. Whether you decide to hire me or not at the end, I don’t even care. It’s not a sales process, it’s really just because I like being helpful, I learn a lot from it, and I know that a lot of my peers out there think the same way about those conversations.

So you should take advantage of all of the resources that you have, and then of course you can decide to take it to the next step and do one on one engagements, or group trainings with many of the folks in the agency coach and consulting community. I would give you one thing to just be careful of as you’re thinking about people that you can pay to work with.

And that is outsourced business development providers. There are a lot of them out there. Some of them can be very good, but you need to really understand that it is not a silver bullet for most of you. And it generally works better for mid size agencies than small agencies. So just before you go down that road, make sure that you’re asking clear questions about what your expectations should be around that.

These outsourced business development providers, typically they are appointment setters. They go out there and they can get you access to potential prospects to have conversations with. But you need to be cautious about it and make sure you have expectations set correctly. I talk with a lot of folks who hear from these folks.

There are a lot of them doing cold outreach. I would tell you any of the ones who are doing really poorly targeted cold outreach, I probably would just ignore completely, but there are some really qualified people in the space who do excellent work, as outsourced business development providers, but you need to really understand what you’re getting into because in many cases it is not the silver bullet that you think it is.

So. As you’re thinking about help, that is the one area that I see come up a lot that I would say is a real potential pitfall for most of you if you’re not careful heading down that path. And the most reputable folks in that community will tell you that they are not a good fit or they will tell you clearly what to expect.

If it sounds too good to be true though, if someone says that there’s no downside for you, that they can absolutely get you, plenty of meaningful conversations. I would pump the brakes on those because the really good folks will tell you what to expect and let you know that it is not a sure thing.

And those are the folks that I think are worth continuing to have conversations with because then you can make an informed judgment as to whether that’s a good fit or not. Now let’s talk about the current environment because We’ve gone through a period where we obviously had the COVID year where things were miserable for a lot of agencies.

Then there was a huge rebound for many in the agency community, particularly those in the events, creative, digital spaces, those kinds of things. But really, all agencies generally did better for a period of time, and now for a good chunk of 2023 and most of 2024, a lot of agencies have struggled. They haven’t necessarily shrunk, but they haven’t grown at the rates that they would like to.

They’ve seen a lot more churn or turmoil amongst their clients, maybe budgets cut, those kinds of things. We’ve all seen that sales cycles have lengthened fairly substantially. Clients have really delayed making decisions or decided not to hire an agency at all. There’s a lot of things that have been in the mix.

And so the real question is, we’re starting to see a little bit more optimism bleeding through at this moment. We’re seeing some good economic reports. Obviously there continues to be some uncertainty. Uncertainty, both internationally and here in the U. S. Was it whether it comes to politics or international affairs or all of these things?

And that all fits into the mix to in addition to the economic news. So there’s a lot of mixed messages out there. And so we need to be thinking about how do we succeed in this particular environment that we’re in today? Some folks have suggested that this sort of murky middle is where we’re destined to be for a period of time as agencies.

Some are saying, you know, we’re just, we see clear skies ahead and that 2025 is going to be a return to maybe not boom times, but, you know, more upward trajectory for the vast majority of agencies. I think it’s too early to tell. That’s my own personal, take on it. But I think we need to think about how do we deal with this uncertainty.

And the first thing that we can do is we should always be thinking in times like these about how we de risk our offerings for our clients. How do we make it easier for them to say yes? And typically that might mean things like being more open to taking on project work versus long term retainer business.

It gives the prospect an opportunity to take you out for a test drive. It gives you an opportunity, frankly, to take them out for a test drive and see how they are to work with, whether you can produce the results that you think you can. And that helps you then scope and price future work a little bit more effectively.

But it might be, There are other ways to de risk things. You can, you could do it through the, the terms making it easier for someone to get out of a retainer agreement. For example, if they don’t see it working, you could make it so that, you know, there are, triggers in there based on performance that allow them to exit earlier.

There’s all sorts of creative solutions that you can come up with to help de risk the decision making. for your prospects, to help them come on board. And so be thinking about how to de risk things as much as possible, because that increases the chances that you will get a good new client on board and begin the relationship in a way that makes sense for them, given that they are probably feeling many of the same things that you are, and they want to be cautious about some of the investments that they’re making for the future as well.

I think another important thing just to always have here is to be patient. And patient doesn’t mean that you sit back and do nothing, that you sit back and just wait for the phone to ring. Patience really means that you don’t become over anxious in your attempts to grow. And so, for example, I talk with a lot of agency owners, who are worried about prospects who are ghosting them and how can we get them to get back to us more quickly?

How can we shorten the sales cycles? And ultimately, my general advice is that you need to make sure that they know that you are there, that you are ready to help, that you are ready to answer questions. But you don’t want to be in a position where you’re really aggressively pushing. This is not selling a car where you just want to hit your number for the month and you, you don’t really care because they bought the car, they’re out the door, no longer your problem, right?

You’re building relationships with folks, which means that you need to have a certain level of patience for the slower decision making that takes place. You need to find ways to continue to share resources with them, be helpful to them, stay top of mind with them, but not actually aggressively push them to get to a closing conversation sooner rather than later. Because if you rush them in they may say yes but it may not end up being a good fit because it wasn’t the right time for them or wasn’t even the right fit at all for them but they just felt the pressure to make a decision.

Sometimes the pressure to make the decision can backfire because it causes them to say no when given the time to work through their own process, their own concerns, their own budget issues, they might have said yes two or three months down the line. So it’s important to have a level of patience without being ignorant of the prospect in order to make sure that you are being as successful as possible.

And frankly, this means that you need to be having more meaningful conversations with prospects and people who can refer business to you than you might have needed to two or three years ago. And so you really want to be having these meaningful conversations and aligning your business development tactics around that as much as possible.

I’ve said it many times already today. I will continue to say it outside of this webinar and elsewhere, but you need to think about how you be help, how you can be helpful. Because in these times when things are continuing to be uncertain and there continues to be turmoil. We hear these conflicting economic reports where we get a great jobs report, but then, you know, maybe the inflation numbers aren’t exactly where we want to see them.

You know, we hear about an agency that just closed a book of business, but maybe we had, a client cancel on us that we didn’t expect. All of these things, it’s impacting everybody. And so thinking about how you can just be generally helpful, it will come back and benefit you. It may not be part of your Q1 2025 growth, but it will help you down the road.

And so make sure that you continue to have that mindset as you go forward. I think another thing that we need to be thinking about in these times when we’ve got clients who want to de risk things, they are generally loathe to increase their own head count. Don’t be afraid to be arms and legs for our clients.

And I know that a lot of you out there have come to me and said, Look, you know, I hear that the way to really make money is to really focus on strategy, and so I want to focus primarily on strategy as an agency. And this is something that, that Gini and I have talked about on the podcast and it’s something that, you know, we’ll continue to talk about because we talk about it offline as well.

Strategy’s all well and good, but a lot of clients just need the extra help. And so if you can figure out how you can be those arms and legs and not just an order taker, not just literally arms and legs that do nothing else, not robot arms and legs, but actually mindful thinking, thoughtful, strategic, creative arms and legs.

It gives you an opportunity to serve some of those clients out there. So don’t turn down your nose at those things where you are providing that additional service for your clients, where it’s maybe less strategic and more implementation. Those are good opportunities for many of you. And particularly in a time when people want to avoid adding headcount or they’re under orders from management not to add headcount, It can be a real opportunity for agencies and, and typically when we see agencies coming out of economic downturns or economic uncertainty, it’s the arms and legs piece that comes back first and the agencies that latch onto that are the ones that are able to grow most effectively.

So, please keep that as part of your arsenal, assuming that it fits with your overall business model. Because I think it’s something that can be really beneficial. Same thing with projects. I, you know, I’ve talked about projects earlier in de risking. I’m a huge fan of projects as part of your mix. I don’t think it should be, for most agencies, the entirety of what you do, but blending retainer and project work can be super effective at building both stable agencies as well as agencies that have a real growth engine to them.

And then finally, I think it’s important for you to stay or become optimistic. And this doesn’t mean head in your sand, head in the sand, Oh my God, everything’s going to be great. You know, not that kind of optimistic, but I think that many of you have become frustrated by some of the numbers that you’ve seen on your P and L’s over the last couple of years, you’re frustrated about what it’s, what’s happening with clients and prospects.

And so it’s really easy to kind of get down on things, but you need to, in order to be successful, in order to have that growth plan that comes to fruition. You need to have an optimism that the things that you are doing will work. You need to have that belief. And it doesn’t, it doesn’t have to be blind faith, but it does have to be pretty convincing belief in what you’re doing.

And so I think as we wrap up here, as we tie this all up with a bow, as I always do at the end of these webinars, I think we need to think about the key things that we’ve talked about today. And this is where your optimism will come from. Your optimism will come from focusing on yourself first, figuring out what you want from the business, and figuring out how, what the baseline is for building that growth plan for the year ahead.

Then you think about how to refine your focus as an agency. How do you come up with your focus that’s going to generate the business that you are looking for, for yourself, and that you can then build for yourself and your team. It should start by simplifying as much as possible. Get rid of the things that don’t make sense, get rid of the services that are unprofitable, eliminate the target markets that don’t make sense, and get rid of business development tasks, tasks, tactics, there we go, that are not functioning well for you.

And instead, emphasize consistency in the things that you’re doing for growth. Narrow it down. Focus on one thing at a time, make those things work, and only when you’ve got something that’s firing on all cylinders do you start adding one more tactic at a time. And there’s no reason for you to be doing this all on your own.

You’ve got a team, you’ve got contractors, you’ve got partners and service providers, you’ve got peers, you’ve got agency coaches and consultants. There are a lot of people out there who can help you so that you don’t have to do this alone and that alone for most of you will help improve your mindset. Because the more people that you’re engaging with and talking with about this the more comfortable you become with the direction that you’re headed and you don’t feel like you’re just making decisions in the dark.

And then finally make sure that you’re prepared to respond to the current environment. Make sure that you’re keeping an eye on things and as the environment continues to improve, hopefully, knock on wood, hopefully you will have the ability to adapt over time as that happens as well. So if you’re thinking about all of those things, then you’ll be in a position to get where you want to be.

So with that, that will wrap up the prepared presentation portion of today’s webinar. So if you’re watching this on replay, this is where the replay will end. If you’re watching live, then you’ll be able to ask your questions of me here live using the Q& A function that is on your screen. If you are watching on replay, or if you are watching live and just don’t want to ask the question publicly.

I’ll put the email address up on the screen chip@sagaimpact.com and I’d be happy to try to answer questions however I can for you. So with that,, thank you all for joining me and I’m going to grab a sip of water and start taking questions. So feel free to fire away in the Q and A box if you haven’t already.

 

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Hello and welcome to today’s SAGA webinar on how to accelerate your agency’s growth in the year ahead. I’m your host, Chip Griffin. I’m the founder of SAGA, the Small Agency Growth Alliance, and I’m looking forward to a good conversation around a topic that I know is on the minds of a lot of you as we’re in the fourth quarter of of 2024 as we present this today.

And so you’re starting in many cases to think about what 2025 looks like putting together budgets and plans, thinking about how you want to make some changes to your business. And so we’re going to talk at a very high level about how I would encourage you to think about those 12 to 15 months that are in front of you and how you can put together a plan to get the results that you want.

Before we jump into the topic at hand, and while people are continuing to filter into the webinar here at the top of the hour, I’ll go through a couple of quick housekeeping items. And so, first of all, I should tell you that there will be a replay available, so you don’t need to take meticulous notes.

You will be able to go back and re watch this if you like. Obviously, if you’re watching this on replay already, you know that. But if you’re here live, you can also use the Q& A function to ask questions. Feel free to submit your question at any time during the course of today’s webinar, and I will take all of the questions at the end of the prepared presentation.

If you’re watching this on replay, you can feel free to email me at chip@sagaimpact.com, and I’ll be happy to try to answer any follow up questions you might have from the content that I provide today. And you can also use it even if you are watching live, if you think of something after the fact, or you just have a question that you’d prefer not to share publicly. If you discuss this webinar on social media, I’d love it if you use the hashtag agency leadership just to make it a little bit easier to discover. And finally, any of the resources that I mentioned today as well as plenty of others are available at sagaimpact.com. Just use the search function at the top of the page and you will be able to find a resource on pretty much any topic that you can think of related to small agencies and if you can’t find it use the ask chip function to ask and I’ll probably create some content Because you’re probably not the only one who has that very question.

So, now let’s jump into the actual topic at hand and what we’re going to be covering today. The first thing I’ll be doing is touching on some big picture principles that you need to think about when you’re thinking about putting together a growth plan for your agency.

I’ll offer some practical suggestions on how you can actually implement those and what you might be thinking about doing in order to grow both revenue and more importantly profits. And finally, I’ll talk about some potential pitfalls, things to be wary of, make sure that you don’t stumble into things that either I’ve done personally or that I know other agency owners have, because why not learn from everyone else’s mistakes rather than having to learn it the hard way yourself.

So the first thing that I would say to you is that you need to start by focusing on yourself. And so what do I mean by that? The very first thing you need to do is thinking about what you want from your business. And I, this is something I talk about quite often because far too many agency owners are operating, not necessarily on autopilot, but they’re doing what they’re what is expected of them, what they believe is the next thing that they should do, what the best practice is, and ultimately you need to start from a position of understanding what you want from your own business.

How much do you want to make? How much flexibility do you want to have in the time that you’re spending? How much time do you want to work on the business? What kind of work do you want to be doing? If you can define those things, define your role and the rewards that you’re getting out of the business, That’s the best starting point.

And this is something that you should be reflecting on at least annually, or whenever there’s a major life event, something that causes you to take a fresh look at the relationship between yourself and your business. And if you do that, it will help you to make better business decisions that give you a higher level of satisfaction.

And I can tell you that the best performing agencies I know typically have agency owners who are satisfied with what they’re getting and what they’re doing. So start there. Start by being just a little bit selfish. to figure those things out. And part of this is figuring out what you want to change.

What are the things that you want to have be different for you next year? It might be making more money, it might be working less, it might be having more time to go to family events, whatever it is, you need to define it. But it also might be on the work side. It might be that you want to spend less time on client service, or you want to free up time to work on business development, or you want to be able to spend your time more strategically and less tactically. Whatever those things are, you need to put this together because this is part of the big picture of what you’re coming up with in order to get the focus for yourself set. Once you’ve got that squared away, now is where we talk about what you were probably coming into this webinar expecting more of, which is focusing on what you do with the agency, how you actually adjust the course for your business in order to get that growth that you’re looking for in the year ahead.

And so you need to start by thinking about what is your agency’s focus. And far too many agencies consider themselves full service agencies who will work with anybody. And anytime they’re asked to do something they try to come up with an additional way to provide that service. You need to have a focus to your business.

It needs to be focused on who you serve, how you serve them, and what results that you produce. And so take a fresh look at that. And the first step in that, when you’re reviewing this for an existing agency, is to ask yourself how you can simplify things. And this isn’t just in terms of your targeting. It starts with asking these key questions.

Should you narrow your services? And I’m not saying that every agency, everyone listening to me today should. But you need to go through the list of services that you claim to provide or actually provide to your clients. And you need to ask yourself, should you be doing that still? You may also want to be expanding it, but we’ll get to that in a later portion of today’s webinar.

Start by eliminating those things that you either can’t do profitably, that you can’t do effectively, that you can’t do because you don’t, or you can do but you don’t enjoy doing them and your team doesn’t enjoy doing them. You really need to have a suite of services that you’re offering that are desired by your clients, but also that allow you to produce the results both financial and for the client that you need in order to be successful.

So the simplification process is sort of a cleaning house that I would encourage you to do as the start of your planning process before you start layering in and adding additional things. Because normally when you think growth your first thing to do is say, okay, what, what are the new services I need to offer that can generate revenue?

What are the new business development tactics that I can do? What are the new people that I can add to my team? You need to be a little bit more introspective first and take a look at what you can eliminate before you start adding anything. Because sometimes When you do that, you will see a clearer path forward because you’re freeing up resources, you’re freeing up mindshare to be able to zero in on those things that have the best results for both your clients and your business.

And you really need to remember that you only want to offer those things that you do really well. Even if you have every client that you have asking for a particular service, if you can’t do it well, don’t offer it just to check that box. Now you may want to partner with somebody so that you can provide an integrated solution for your clients so that they only have to deal with a single point of contact.

Maybe it only even a single payment source. If you’re happy to manage payments to that other provider, but don’t go out and add something simply because clients are asking for it. If you’re asked to manage Facebook ads and you’re not good at it. Don’t do it. It will hurt your reputation. It will be unprofitable in the end, and it potentially will cost you the business that you already do well.

So as you’re doing this narrowing process, take a really critical look at those things that you struggle to produce the results that your clients are expecting. And remember, you need to think of this in terms of what your client expects. You can’t simply say, well, I know I’m doing as good a job as I can, or I’m doing a good job.

If your client is not perceiving it, then it doesn’t matter. And so think about that in terms of how you’re paring back your services for the year ahead. It’s not just the services though, you also want to think about who you’re targeting. And I talked earlier about how a lot of agencies are just claiming to be full service and will work with anybody who comes through the door.

And you really need to think about how you can lean on the experience that you have as an agency and as an agency owner, because your past experience often matters as well, particularly if your agency may be only say three to five years old, the things that you’ve done in the past are particularly relevant, but even 20 years into owning your agency, your own personal background, if you own a small agency is still going to be very important, and so you need to think about the kinds of businesses that you’ve served, and so you need to think about Are you as well focused, as well targeted as you can be, or should you be eliminating some of the places that you are?

For example, If you say that I specialize in automotive and technology and pharmaceuticals and manufacturing, you’ve got a huge breadth of things there, some of which overlaps and some of which doesn’t. You need to think about how you can tailor that down. And you’ll find in the SAGA resources a lot of things about how to find your focus as an agency. So if you type and find your focus into the search box, you will find webinars and articles and podcast episodes that will help you walk through this in more detail so we don’t have to spend a lot of time on it today, but really think about that and really think about how you can reduce your target market that you’re serving so that you can truly be a specialist.

Because specialists are the ones who succeed. Specialist agencies are the ones that people identify and say, I need to work with these folks because they under, they get me. But it’s also important because it makes your job easier. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You don’t have to have your team relearn a new industry every time a new client comes on.

If you work with similar types of businesses or similar industries or really similar problem sets that your clients have, all of those things contribute to you being more efficient and more effective. If you’re a PR agency, you build some media lists and you’re able to reuse them because you’re targeting similar members of the media for your client base. If you’re selling PPC ads or doing SEO, you understand the business, you understand the search terms, you understand the clients and how they’re going to be responding to them, the, your client’s clients, that is. And so the more that you understand about the business, the better those results are, the less time you spend learning, which means you get faster results for clients.

And it also means that you waste less time, i. e. you generate more profit because you’re not ramping up and continuously having to learn something brand new every time you work with a new client. So be that specialist, be the person that prospects and clients lean on because you understand them, you speak their language, you know their problems and you understand how to solve them.

But now let’s, we’ve talked about reducing services. We’ve talked about reducing the number of targets that you have. Let’s talk about business development tactics, because this is another area that typically, and many of you tuning in may be thinking, I’m just going to give you a list of things that you should do more of.

And we’ll, we’ll talk about some of the things that you probably should do more of. But first, again, take a look at your current suite of business development tactics. And you should really be thinking about business development in a couple of different key ways. The first thing that you need to have in mind is that your goal should be to being helpful. It’s not to sell.

You are not selling widgets. You are not out there creating the master sales process. And I know a lot of agencies like to talk about the sales funnel and all of that. But at the end of the day, when it comes to agency business development, the key ingredients for most of you is going to be that you need to find a way to be helpful, to be seen as being helpful.

And that means providing resources, providing time, talking to people, whether that’s at events or one on one, because ultimately your goal for business development really should be to have meaningful conversations. The more meaningful conversations that you have, with prospects, or people who can refer prospective clients, the more likely you are to have success.

So whether you’re hosting webinars, or creating blog posts, or hosting a podcast, or doing cold outreach, or posting on LinkedIn, ultimately your goal for all of those things should be that you’re having meaningful conversations with people that you want to be talking with, that you want to be building relationships with.

And so you should be measuring the success of your business development tactics by that meaningful conversations metric. Well, what is a meaningful conversation? A meaningful conversation, it doesn’t necessarily need to be a sales pitch or a going through what your capabilities deck is, or any of those kinds of things.

It’s substantive conversations that allow you to share your expertise that allows the person on the other end of that conversation to understand what you do, not necessarily in excruciating detail or in a sales oriented format, but they get you, they understand who you serve, what you do and how you make a difference.

And if you’re doing that on a regular basis, you will be building that network of people that will at the right moment in time be able to talk with you about an actual opportunity. Because ultimately business development in the agency world is right place, right time. You can talk to the most qualified prospect in the world, but if they’re not in need of an agency at a particular moment in time, then you are not going to have success.

So you need to find a way to continue to be helpful with them, to them, to have meaningful conversations with them, and then when they are ready, or when they have someone who comes to them and says, Hey, I’m looking for this kind of agency, they will think of you because you have remained top of mind through all of these tactics that you’re doing.

So as you’re thinking about winnowing down your suite of business development tactics as an agency, as part of your cleaning house for the start of the new year, you should be thinking about are the things that you’re doing achieving these goals. And so you need to ask what’s working. And the flip, what isn’t working?

Because it’s very easy to accumulate a whole bunch of different things. Maybe someone told you that you should be posting on LinkedIn a few times a week, so you start doing that. Maybe someone else told you that you should have an email newsletter, so you took a stab at that. Maybe someone else told you that you should be a podcast guest, so you hired a PR agency to help get you on various podcasts.

Evaluate all of the things that you’re doing today and ask if they’re working or not. If they aren’t working, is there something that you could easily change to perhaps see results out of it? And I’ll tell you what the key thing is that causes most agency business development tactics to fail in just a moment.

But ask yourself if there’s something obvious that you could change to give it another go. If not, maybe it’s something that you want to set aside. But the other factor that you need to think about when you’re assembling your list of business development tactics as an agency in order to grow, is What are the things that you enjoy doing as an owner most, or at least that you hate the least?

There are a lot of agency owners who dislike most aspects of business development except the, the closing conversation, the strategic piece of it, you know, the tail end of the process. The having the initial conversations, the do, you know, doing the work that it takes in order to generate those meaningful conversations.

A lot of times there is more reluctance there, and so you need to ask yourself, what are the things that you will enjoy doing the most because if you don’t enjoy doing it if you hate doing it that’s a deterrent to you doing it consistently And we’ll talk more about consistency in a minute because that is the key point that you need to consider And so if you love talking to people if you love having conversations like I am right now maybe you want to host webinars or host podcasts But if not, if that’s, if the idea of a camera or microphone in front of you is something you dread, don’t do it.

Maybe you like to write so you can create written content. Maybe you don’t like to do that, but you like to speak at events. So it’s the, it’s the camera part of the, the equation, , that bothers you. But maybe you like to go to events and either speak to large groups, small groups, do networking.

There’s a lot of different ways that you can go about doing things, but you need to have alignment as the owner. Going back to our very first point today, that you need to tailor this plan to you and to your unique needs and interests. Because that’s how agencies are successful. They’re not successful because they followed some other person’s playbook and some other person’s plan for how they built their own successful agency.

That’s all great stuff to internalize. It’s great to listen to someone like me and what I’ve done and what works for me, but it may not be what works for you. And so you need to think about the things that you will be doing and you will be happy enough to do them that you will do them well and you will do them consistently.

So evaluate everything, whether you’re removing it or adding it, based in part on that metric. And now that you’ve gone through this list, you’ve winnowed out the things that you don’t do well, that aren’t working, that just aren’t the right fit for you going forward, now you need to start thinking about what are you going to do?

For a business development standpoint to grow. Because obviously eliminating things that in and of itself is not going to typically generate success. What you need to do is you do need to come up with some initiatives for growth that do make sense, that do fit the criteria that we’ve talked about.

Being helpful, generating meaningful conversations and being something that you are happy enough to do as an agency owner that you will stick with it. And so you should pick one thing. And I, one of the mistakes that I’ve seen quite often and that I’ve frankly done myself many times over the years is that I have too many initiatives going at one time.

And if you sit down and say, okay, in order to grow in 2025, I’m going to start doing three things. I’m going to be posting regularly on LinkedIn. I’m going to start a podcast and I’m going to start an email newsletter. It’s possible that will work. But you’re spreading yourself pretty thin there. And my suggestion to you is that you take one thing and make that your focal point and say to yourself, okay, I know that I can do this well.

And so I’m going to start this and I’m going to do it well. I’m going to do it consistently because consistency above all is the key thing. I can tell you that agencies are successful with cold outreach, with inbound, with paid ads with pretty much anything can make you successful. What makes you unsuccessful is doing them intermittently.

So I was working with an agency leader a number of years ago who launched a direct mail campaign, targeted a particular group and then the next week said, okay, well who should we target next? And of course the answer is, and anybody who’s been in direct mail knows that the answer is, you keep going after the same people until they feel like, oh my god, these people are talking to me all the time.

And you need to be thinking the same way. If you aren’t really tired of some of the tactics that you’re doing, then you probably aren’t doing them enough. It doesn’t mean again that you need to hate it, but it does mean that you need to stick with it and you need to remember that many people in your target audience are not hearing from you nearly as often as you think they are.

And we give this same advice to our clients as public relations folks, as marketers, as advertisers. But we don’t do a good job of internalizing these lessons ourselves. So we need to be consistent. We need to do one thing, and we need to do it consistently well. And only then do we think about adding one more tactic.

Now, this doesn’t mean that you can’t mix together some tools around the same thing. So for example, if I were to start hosting a podcast as an agency, it would make sense to be posting about that on LinkedIn. It would make sense to have an email newsletter that promotes it. But your core tactic, the core part of your strategy, is to have the podcast, and then the other things are in support of that.

You’re not creating a separate, newsletter, or a separate LinkedIn campaign, or those things. It’s all tied together. So you need to think about how you start with one tactic, do it well, and then gradually add additional tactics to the mix. But it’s more than just tactics. In order to be successful, in order to have a growth plan for the new year, you need to get help.

And I’m not saying, Oh my God, you need help. Maybe you do. But what you need to do is you need to look around you. And you need to ask yourself what resources that you have so that you don’t just go it alone. And one of the key things that you can do is leverage your own team. It’s quite often the case that agency owners, particularly in small agencies, will try to sit down and come up with plans on their own.

And it’s great to be sitting there and thinking about things, whether you’re driving in the car, sitting on the couch, or in the shower, wherever you come up with your big ideas, it’s great. You should absolutely do those things. But you also need to involve your team in it. And you can’t say, I want to leave my team alone because they’re already so busy with these other things.

At the end of the day, it’s good for your team if your agency is growing. And so you need to talk with them about that, help them to understand that and get their input. Ask them, bounce ideas off of them. They know you pretty well. They know your clients pretty well. If you’re thinking about making a change in your targeting, in your services that you’re providing, in your business development tactics, your team is a fantastic resource to help you with the planning process. But they’re also really good at helping you with the execution if you let them. And my encouragement to you is to treat yourself as a client. I always tell agencies this. Treat yourself as a client. Have someone, oftentimes a junior person that you’re trying to get experience in leading a client team, have them have your own agency as their client.

Have them put together a plan for the services that you provide to your clients. How can they provide some of those services for your agency itself? How does that fit into the mix? It’s a great professional development opportunity for your team. It’s a great way to experiment and test new ideas because you can control whether you say yes or no.

You don’t have to go pitch something new to a client and see if they’ll bite. So if you want to test out how podcasting works and you think you might want to use it for a client, start your own. Get to understand it, learn it, see how it works, see literally how it functions, but also the results that it provides.

You can do the same thing with LinkedIn strategies or paid ads on a particular platform or whatever it might be. You have the opportunity to experiment on yourself and your team can help you to do that and they will learn in the process as well. So take that as your very first level of help no matter what.

They’re absolutely critical. But you can look beyond the people that you pay to work for you on a day to day basis. You also have contractors who work on projects. You have partner agencies that you work with, or maybe third party providers. Talk with them, too. See what they’re seeing. Some of it may just be asking, what are you seeing out there in the current economic environment?

What are you seeing that clients and prospects are looking for or talking about? How are you seeing people , succeed on this platform or that platform. Get as much information as you can be open and talking with folks as much as you can in order to be gathering intelligence, getting ideas. And perhaps in the case of contractors and partners and even third party providers, you may find some referral opportunities there.

It could be bi directional. It could be that they send business to you. It might be that you send business to them and that generates goodwill that can help you down the road as well. So make sure that you’re thinking about all these people that you’re engaging with employees and others that you’re, you’re paying in some fashion for some kind of work or service.

They are people who can be beneficial to you as you’re putting together your growth plan and as you’re executing upon it in 2025 as well. Of course you also should be thinking about your peers. Other agency owners are sitting in the same box, in the same chair that you are. They’re going through the same challenges, they’re seeing many of the same things.

And we need to remember that the vast majority of other agencies out there are not our true competitors. And frankly, even if they are, you can still generally get some benefit from getting to know them, talking with them, having coffee, having a zoom conversation, whatever it might be to just talk things through and see where things are, how things are going, ask their own experiences, and you can learn from each other.

Your peers are an incredible resource. You can access your peers just through one on one conversations by reaching out. I’m sure you already know agency owners yourself, but certainly you can get to know additional ones through platforms like LinkedIn. You can also of course join the SAGA community on Slack or Gini’s Spin Sucks community.

These are all great places to engage with other leaders in the industry that we’re in in order to be able to better understand what’s working? What’s not? What challenges are out there? And what we’re hearing? Are we, are we hearing that business is growing, the opportunities are coming back, that, you know, clients are starting to spend?

What, what exactly are we hearing? What, how do we feel about some of the economic news that’s out there? How does some of the, the political or international stories that are out there, how is that impacting how clients think, if at all? And the more people that you talk to, the more information that you have in order to make better decisions for your growth plan.

Of course, you can work with coaches and consultants. There are lots of opportunities to do that, whether that’s someone like me or others out there. But there are also a lot of free resources that we all put out like these webinars. Most of the folks in the agency coaching and consulting community have a ton of free resources, whether that’s podcasts or webinars or articles, and you should be taking advantage of that.

from all sorts of different people, whether that’s the Agency Management Institute, my own SAGA, Karl Sakas, David C. Baker, I could go on and on about all the folks who provide lots of good things that you should be accessing and thinking about as you’re putting together your plans for the new year. And a lot of us are happy to have initial conversations with you.

I offer a free consultation, for example, and I’m happy to talk through anything you want. Whether you decide to hire me or not at the end, I don’t even care. It’s not a sales process, it’s really just because I like being helpful, I learn a lot from it, and I know that a lot of my peers out there think the same way about those conversations.

So you should take advantage of all of the resources that you have, and then of course you can decide to take it to the next step and do one on one engagements, or group trainings with many of the folks in the agency coach and consulting community. I would give you one thing to just be careful of as you’re thinking about people that you can pay to work with.

And that is outsourced business development providers. There are a lot of them out there. Some of them can be very good, but you need to really understand that it is not a silver bullet for most of you. And it generally works better for mid size agencies than small agencies. So just before you go down that road, make sure that you’re asking clear questions about what your expectations should be around that.

These outsourced business development providers, typically they are appointment setters. They go out there and they can get you access to potential prospects to have conversations with. But you need to be cautious about it and make sure you have expectations set correctly. I talk with a lot of folks who hear from these folks.

There are a lot of them doing cold outreach. I would tell you any of the ones who are doing really poorly targeted cold outreach, I probably would just ignore completely, but there are some really qualified people in the space who do excellent work, as outsourced business development providers, but you need to really understand what you’re getting into because in many cases it is not the silver bullet that you think it is.

So. As you’re thinking about help, that is the one area that I see come up a lot that I would say is a real potential pitfall for most of you if you’re not careful heading down that path. And the most reputable folks in that community will tell you that they are not a good fit or they will tell you clearly what to expect.

If it sounds too good to be true though, if someone says that there’s no downside for you, that they can absolutely get you, plenty of meaningful conversations. I would pump the brakes on those because the really good folks will tell you what to expect and let you know that it is not a sure thing.

And those are the folks that I think are worth continuing to have conversations with because then you can make an informed judgment as to whether that’s a good fit or not. Now let’s talk about the current environment because We’ve gone through a period where we obviously had the COVID year where things were miserable for a lot of agencies.

Then there was a huge rebound for many in the agency community, particularly those in the events, creative, digital spaces, those kinds of things. But really, all agencies generally did better for a period of time, and now for a good chunk of 2023 and most of 2024, a lot of agencies have struggled. They haven’t necessarily shrunk, but they haven’t grown at the rates that they would like to.

They’ve seen a lot more churn or turmoil amongst their clients, maybe budgets cut, those kinds of things. We’ve all seen that sales cycles have lengthened fairly substantially. Clients have really delayed making decisions or decided not to hire an agency at all. There’s a lot of things that have been in the mix.

And so the real question is, we’re starting to see a little bit more optimism bleeding through at this moment. We’re seeing some good economic reports. Obviously there continues to be some uncertainty. Uncertainty, both internationally and here in the U. S. Was it whether it comes to politics or international affairs or all of these things?

And that all fits into the mix to in addition to the economic news. So there’s a lot of mixed messages out there. And so we need to be thinking about how do we succeed in this particular environment that we’re in today? Some folks have suggested that this sort of murky middle is where we’re destined to be for a period of time as agencies.

Some are saying, you know, we’re just, we see clear skies ahead and that 2025 is going to be a return to maybe not boom times, but, you know, more upward trajectory for the vast majority of agencies. I think it’s too early to tell. That’s my own personal, take on it. But I think we need to think about how do we deal with this uncertainty.

And the first thing that we can do is we should always be thinking in times like these about how we de risk our offerings for our clients. How do we make it easier for them to say yes? And typically that might mean things like being more open to taking on project work versus long term retainer business.

It gives the prospect an opportunity to take you out for a test drive. It gives you an opportunity, frankly, to take them out for a test drive and see how they are to work with, whether you can produce the results that you think you can. And that helps you then scope and price future work a little bit more effectively.

But it might be, There are other ways to de risk things. You can, you could do it through the, the terms making it easier for someone to get out of a retainer agreement. For example, if they don’t see it working, you could make it so that, you know, there are, triggers in there based on performance that allow them to exit earlier.

There’s all sorts of creative solutions that you can come up with to help de risk the decision making. for your prospects, to help them come on board. And so be thinking about how to de risk things as much as possible, because that increases the chances that you will get a good new client on board and begin the relationship in a way that makes sense for them, given that they are probably feeling many of the same things that you are, and they want to be cautious about some of the investments that they’re making for the future as well.

I think another important thing just to always have here is to be patient. And patient doesn’t mean that you sit back and do nothing, that you sit back and just wait for the phone to ring. Patience really means that you don’t become over anxious in your attempts to grow. And so, for example, I talk with a lot of agency owners, who are worried about prospects who are ghosting them and how can we get them to get back to us more quickly?

How can we shorten the sales cycles? And ultimately, my general advice is that you need to make sure that they know that you are there, that you are ready to help, that you are ready to answer questions. But you don’t want to be in a position where you’re really aggressively pushing. This is not selling a car where you just want to hit your number for the month and you, you don’t really care because they bought the car, they’re out the door, no longer your problem, right?

You’re building relationships with folks, which means that you need to have a certain level of patience for the slower decision making that takes place. You need to find ways to continue to share resources with them, be helpful to them, stay top of mind with them, but not actually aggressively push them to get to a closing conversation sooner rather than later. Because if you rush them in they may say yes but it may not end up being a good fit because it wasn’t the right time for them or wasn’t even the right fit at all for them but they just felt the pressure to make a decision.

Sometimes the pressure to make the decision can backfire because it causes them to say no when given the time to work through their own process, their own concerns, their own budget issues, they might have said yes two or three months down the line. So it’s important to have a level of patience without being ignorant of the prospect in order to make sure that you are being as successful as possible.

And frankly, this means that you need to be having more meaningful conversations with prospects and people who can refer business to you than you might have needed to two or three years ago. And so you really want to be having these meaningful conversations and aligning your business development tactics around that as much as possible.

I’ve said it many times already today. I will continue to say it outside of this webinar and elsewhere, but you need to think about how you be help, how you can be helpful. Because in these times when things are continuing to be uncertain and there continues to be turmoil. We hear these conflicting economic reports where we get a great jobs report, but then, you know, maybe the inflation numbers aren’t exactly where we want to see them.

You know, we hear about an agency that just closed a book of business, but maybe we had, a client cancel on us that we didn’t expect. All of these things, it’s impacting everybody. And so thinking about how you can just be generally helpful, it will come back and benefit you. It may not be part of your Q1 2025 growth, but it will help you down the road.

And so make sure that you continue to have that mindset as you go forward. I think another thing that we need to be thinking about in these times when we’ve got clients who want to de risk things, they are generally loathe to increase their own head count. Don’t be afraid to be arms and legs for our clients.

And I know that a lot of you out there have come to me and said, Look, you know, I hear that the way to really make money is to really focus on strategy, and so I want to focus primarily on strategy as an agency. And this is something that, that Gini and I have talked about on the podcast and it’s something that, you know, we’ll continue to talk about because we talk about it offline as well.

Strategy’s all well and good, but a lot of clients just need the extra help. And so if you can figure out how you can be those arms and legs and not just an order taker, not just literally arms and legs that do nothing else, not robot arms and legs, but actually mindful thinking, thoughtful, strategic, creative arms and legs.

It gives you an opportunity to serve some of those clients out there. So don’t turn down your nose at those things where you are providing that additional service for your clients, where it’s maybe less strategic and more implementation. Those are good opportunities for many of you. And particularly in a time when people want to avoid adding headcount or they’re under orders from management not to add headcount, It can be a real opportunity for agencies and, and typically when we see agencies coming out of economic downturns or economic uncertainty, it’s the arms and legs piece that comes back first and the agencies that latch onto that are the ones that are able to grow most effectively.

So, please keep that as part of your arsenal, assuming that it fits with your overall business model. Because I think it’s something that can be really beneficial. Same thing with projects. I, you know, I’ve talked about projects earlier in de risking. I’m a huge fan of projects as part of your mix. I don’t think it should be, for most agencies, the entirety of what you do, but blending retainer and project work can be super effective at building both stable agencies as well as agencies that have a real growth engine to them.

And then finally, I think it’s important for you to stay or become optimistic. And this doesn’t mean head in your sand, head in the sand, Oh my God, everything’s going to be great. You know, not that kind of optimistic, but I think that many of you have become frustrated by some of the numbers that you’ve seen on your P and L’s over the last couple of years, you’re frustrated about what it’s, what’s happening with clients and prospects.

And so it’s really easy to kind of get down on things, but you need to, in order to be successful, in order to have that growth plan that comes to fruition. You need to have an optimism that the things that you are doing will work. You need to have that belief. And it doesn’t, it doesn’t have to be blind faith, but it does have to be pretty convincing belief in what you’re doing.

And so I think as we wrap up here, as we tie this all up with a bow, as I always do at the end of these webinars, I think we need to think about the key things that we’ve talked about today. And this is where your optimism will come from. Your optimism will come from focusing on yourself first, figuring out what you want from the business, and figuring out how, what the baseline is for building that growth plan for the year ahead.

Then you think about how to refine your focus as an agency. How do you come up with your focus that’s going to generate the business that you are looking for, for yourself, and that you can then build for yourself and your team. It should start by simplifying as much as possible. Get rid of the things that don’t make sense, get rid of the services that are unprofitable, eliminate the target markets that don’t make sense, and get rid of business development tasks, tasks, tactics, there we go, that are not functioning well for you.

And instead, emphasize consistency in the things that you’re doing for growth. Narrow it down. Focus on one thing at a time, make those things work, and only when you’ve got something that’s firing on all cylinders do you start adding one more tactic at a time. And there’s no reason for you to be doing this all on your own.

You’ve got a team, you’ve got contractors, you’ve got partners and service providers, you’ve got peers, you’ve got agency coaches and consultants. There are a lot of people out there who can help you so that you don’t have to do this alone and that alone for most of you will help improve your mindset. Because the more people that you’re engaging with and talking with about this the more comfortable you become with the direction that you’re headed and you don’t feel like you’re just making decisions in the dark.

And then finally make sure that you’re prepared to respond to the current environment. Make sure that you’re keeping an eye on things and as the environment continues to improve, hopefully, knock on wood, hopefully you will have the ability to adapt over time as that happens as well. So if you’re thinking about all of those things, then you’ll be in a position to get where you want to be.

So with that, that will wrap up the prepared presentation portion of today’s webinar. So if you’re watching this on replay, this is where the replay will end. If you’re watching live, then you’ll be able to ask your questions of me here live using the Q& A function that is on your screen. If you are watching on replay, or if you are watching live and just don’t want to ask the question publicly.

I’ll put the email address up on the screen chip@sagaimpact.com and I’d be happy to try to answer questions however I can for you. So with that,, thank you all for joining me and I’m going to grab a sip of water and start taking questions. So feel free to fire away in the Q and A box if you haven’t already.

 

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