Author: Mat Bennett

  • How much is a retainer client ACTUALLY worth?

    ]It feels simple, but it can be deceptively tricky to work out your average customer lifetime value from ongoing relationships like retainers. Unlike project work where the value is clear and finite, calculating value for retainer clients means wrestling with uncertainty. Some clients have been with us for years and show no signs of leaving….

  • Agency CRMs – Analysis and recommendations

    A discussion in an agency community piqued my interest about how agencies are using CRMs in their business. The thread was started by an agency owner looking for CRM recommendations and the responses were largely people responding with their favourite of the usual suspects. What struck me was how different the tools were that were…

  • Leave cash on the table – Do your agency finances need to grow up?

    When an agency is first founded, the finances are often handled in the simplest of ways, with the current bank balance being the main metric monitored. The founder knows they’re making money if the bank balance is growing, and knows they aren’t if it shrinks.. Cash accounting, as your accountant will call this approach, is…

  • Give more. Take less.

    I think everyone should do more things that DON’T have an immediate and measurable ROI. It’s sometimes tempting to look at everything as a line in a P&L – a cost in time, money, or opportunity that we need to have a measurable return from. Our time on LinkedIn gets measured in network growth, our…

  • Better not bigger: Rethinking growth as a goal

    There are few things that make me question a LinkedIn connection request more than the overuse of words like “growth” and “scale” in someone’s profile. These people are often members of the Cult of Growth, which seems to be so popular on LinkedIn. I see enough of their regurgitated sermons without engaging with their DMs…

  • Beyond the craft: Expertise isn’t enough to build a successful agency

    Many agencies are born from a talent for “the craft” they will deliver. A talented designer founds a creative agency, a gifted programmer starts a development shop or a PPC expert starts a paid media agency. Each of these founders (and scores like them) shares a common starting point: a profound expertise and passion for…

  • Rethinking the hustle: Should we really ‘Work hard, retire early’ ?

    Working ridiculous, long hours and failing to take holiday are almost badges of honour for many business owners. Whenever I ask anyone sporting those badges why they do it I tend to get a mixture of three common answers: It’s the last of those points I really want to address, as it is both the…

  • Stop hiding in your blanket fort

    Running a business isn’t just hard; it can be relentless. We all have a finite capacity for the number of hard things we can deal with at once, and that capacity is often not enough. We all have different ways to cope when we feel ourselves reaching (or passing) that capacity, but I want to…

  • Unplugging BossGPT: Why you need to stop being your team’s answer engine

    Have you ever counted up the sheer number of questions you field each day as a leader? Or calculated the hours you sacrifice giving answers to ‘quick questions’? While being available for quick questions might seem like the WD-40 that keeps your agency running smoothly, it comes with its own set of hidden costs. Once…