I often review agency pipelines with founders in order to better understand what specific actions we can take to fill that pipeline with more high-quality leads. The aim is to understand what is working and identify what is replicable, which starts by asking where each lead came from. Two phrases constantly get in the way…
If you disappeared from your business for a few weeks, with no notice and no laptop, what would break first? It’s not a fun question to ask, but it’s one I put to founders often, because the answer often reveals something far more important than a missing process. It shows where the business still depends…
I was recently asked what the one problem was that I’d like to solve for every agency I work with. I knew where the question was going. This person sells lead gen services and wanted me to say “lack of leads,” so they could pitch me on sending my clients their way. It’s a painfully…
I’ve long believed that too many founder-led businesses fall into the trap of measuring success using the wrong metrics. It’s easy to see why: most business commentary centres around large, shareholder-owned companies, and we’re taught that this is what “business” looks like. So we inherit their metrics: revenue, growth, headcount, EBITDA… and use them as…
Here’s something people don’t want to talk about, but I have wanted to get off my chest for a while: The web is toast. Cold, burnt toast. There’s a lot of noise about how LLMs are killing search, but that’s a narrow view that ignores the bigger picture. Google isn’t just worried about LLMs disrupting…
Spicy opinion incoming: Most of what agency leaders do has very little to do with actual leadership. We’re constantly busy with meetings, emails and firefighting. It’s sometimes difficult to find a time for a toilet break in our stuffed diaries. Work spills into the evenings and bleeds into weekends. We’re undeniably busy, but much of…
]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….
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…
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…
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…