Engineering the model

On the mechanics of the agency. Focuses on the structural health of the business, from unit economics and utilization to the systems that make progress predictable.

  • What is an agency anyway?

    Exploring the three pillars of strategy, delivery, and leverage that define a genuine agency business.

  • What breaks first?

    A diagnostic exercise to identify structural bottlenecks and where a business is overly dependent on the founder.

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Want a smarter agency? Get a brain

    Recent years have seen a rise in the personal productivity approach of building a “second-brain”; The idea of capturing thoughts, notes and ideas in one central software repository.” – This sentence should be split into two: “Recent years have seen a rise in the personal productivity approach of building a “second-brain”. The idea involves capturing…

  • Tick Tick Tick… here comes the communications explosion

    There’s a point in a growing business where things often take a sudden shift from “Wow, this is going well” to “Help, it’s all falling apart”. It’s rarely one thing, but instead a rapidly growing undercurrent of things being missed, inconsistent delivery and decreasing morale. A panicked leader might even try to fix it by…

  • Close it, Sell it or Die

    All good things come to an end and your involvement with your agency will be no exception. It’s no more avoidable than death or taxes (and will possibly involve at least one of those things). Despite this,  many agency leaders never give serious consideration to this inevitable business milestone. They should. Knowing where you want…