Internal Collaboration: Keeping The Agency Team Together And Facing In The Right Direction
Agency specialist and behavioural coach Nikki Gattenby works with agency founders and leaders to help them become unstoppable. However, this approach has a particular challenge: how to keep the agency together and help everyone move in the right direction at a pace?
Enter the 3Ps of agency management. Don’t forget to download your free copy of The Agency Growth Book 2024 to unlock Nikki’s full article.
Purpose. Profit. People.
If, as an agency leader, you want to keep your people on the same page, it helps to put them on par with profit and purpose. In fact, you can transform your business performance by doing exactly that. (editor’s note: This isn’t a purpose yawn. Promise!).
Effective internal collaboration within an agency hinges on three essential elements: purpose, profit, and people. Purpose, a clear and inspiring reason for existence, is crucial for attracting and retaining top talent.
Agencies should be more than profit-driven entities; they must make a positive impact on the world. While not the sole objective, Profit is essential for sustainability and should be approached with pride. It reflects a culmination of actions taken, both past and future.
Resource planning, focusing on leading indicators, such as revenue forecasts and client portfolio balance, is key to maintaining profitability. Engaging your team, setting clear goals, and fostering a purpose-driven culture can have a profound impact on the agency’s success. Clarity on purpose, coupled with a profit-focused approach, allows agencies to thrive while putting people at the forefront.
“As agencies are largely populated with people to create value, it’s the actions of those people that really matter. Keeping them all together and facing in the right direction is critical for a positive profit culture, and creating profit- positive actions.”
Purpose
Talented people have choices. As agency leaders, we are in a position to share compelling reasons for them to choose to work with us.
Long gone are the days when agencies were in business to make money alone. It’s a bit old hat; we’ve moved on from Friedman economics that the only purpose of business is to create as much money as possible for the shareholders... and it’s not exactly motivating for current and future employees when deciding where they would like to develop their career.
Embracing a clear purpose ensures actionable goals and attracts the right people. It focuses decision-making on prospects, services, and pricing to create value and sustain agency success. Understanding your purpose drives clarity, prevents overextension, and enhances client relationships while maintaining agency sustainability.
Without a sense of purpose, we may be simply hoping to attract the right staff. And in this case, hope is not a strategy. Once you are clear about what you stand for, it creates laser focus for decision making, particularly knowing your stance on: 1 prospects and clients, 2 products and services, 3 pricing and negotiation:
You know what your prospects and your Ideal Client Profile look like, preventing you from pitching for everything and anything that comes across your desk and knackering your team in the process.
You know what you’re the best in the world at delivering and are super clear with clients on what your products and services are, knowing you can create value and impact, without trying to be all things to all clients and terrifying/confusing both your team and your clients in the process.
You know what you are prepared to negotiate on with clients and procurement to price your impact well and create value for both you and your client without undermining your agency's sustainability and ultimately putting the client project at risk if you’ve not priced it well at the start.
Knowing why you exist removes uncertainty from the system, giving you space to think, create, and deliver the value you know you are worth.
Profit
Creating a profit culture is essential for business sustainability and progress. Profit should be seen as a positive outcome of effective business actions and not something to be ashamed of. Key strategies include maintaining a revenue forecast, having a clear pipeline, ensuring sufficient overhead cover, balancing the client portfolio, calculating client profitability, and maintaining a visible commercial dashboard. Clear strategic goals and visible metrics help galvanize the team to make informed decisions and drive profitability.
Make profit with pride to fuel your purpose. Profit is not a dirty word, and it’s not the only reason to exist either—it matters, and being good at creating it is nothing to be ashamed of.
No profit, no progress.
We know this. Profit means you are sustainable, ideally with six months’ salary cover in the bank and no client worth more than your profit margin, creating secure cash flow to keep you thriving. Creating a Profit Culture will help you do exactly that.
A Profit Culture?
Yes, profit is a lagging indicator, but it is an outcome of all the other actions you take in business. Profits happen when you do everything else right. And as agencies are largely populated with people who create value, it’s the actions of those people that really matter. Keeping them all together and facing in the right direction is critical for a positive profit culture and for creating profit-positive actions.
So what does that look like?
Whilst profit is a lagging indicator of past actions, we need to look at the leading indicators, all the future actions you are going to take to create that profit along the way:
Have a revenue forecast - give people visibility so they can make decisions with the numbers to back them up
Have a clear picture of your pipeline—this will allow the team to get excited about potential clients and help plan resources around both pitching and pitch wins.
You should know how many months of overhead cover you have in the bank to make decisions about investments or cost savings.
Work to balance your client portfolio so no one client is dominating your time, attention and P&L - therein, danger lies for you, them and your other clients
Calculate client profitability and look out for any profit vampires - those clients who take way more than they give - and do something about them.
Have a clear commercial dashboard that is visible and accessible to the team.
In short, it helps the people on the ground know what they need to do to keep the business afloat. Strategic aims, operationalized as visible goals, are the front runners to all of this, expressed as a clear set of numbers that are easy to remember and that people galvanize.
People
If your people know why your company exists, why it’s compelling for them to engage with it, what value the agency adds to the world and how you’re going to be self-sustaining to continue to do so, you’re about 150% ahead of so many businesses that aren’t clear on these things from the start.
Without purpose, people can feel like cogs in a machine, working hard for no apparent greater outcome than a salary. Unfortunately, burnout in the agency world is rife. For such an innovative, creative industry, this is simply wrong. It’s 2024!
At the turn of the century, there was no Facebook, Meta, Twitter, X, or YouTube. TikTok was a mere whisper in someone’s imagination. The iPhone was seven years away, and the iPad was ten years away. It’s bonkers but true.
These changes in technology have underpinned a fundamental disruption to the status quo: fake news, the sharing economy, the gig economy, the growing fear/joy of AI, and the post-COVID world of people demanding to work flexibly...the list goes on.
Yet despite this radical shake-up we’ve all been living through, too many businesses haven’t moved with the times. They’re still wedded to old-school ways of squeezing as many hours as possible out of their employees, who they see as ‘assets to be sweated’ (urgh). It’s no wonder so many employees feel so disengaged. The daft thing is there’s a whole bunch of evidence to suggest that engagement of your people pays.
As the above numbers show, our goal was to have scores of 90%+ engagement across the agency team. This was a deliberate and active target that guided many decisions about what to do in any given situation.
In a world where the average work engagement rate is under 25% (blimey), having an engaged team can be game-changing in terms of performance.
“Businesses that ignore this evidence are increasingly being left behind. Businesses that engage with it keep their team together and facing in the right direction.”
In Short
Be clear on your purpose.
Create a profit culture to fuel it.
Put your people on a par with purpose and profit - and watch your agency thrive.
When you’re driven by purpose, everything clicks. This keeps the team together, provides you with staying power, and helps you make hard decisions rather than avoid them.
People who share your purpose will gravitate towards you and become a tribe of advocates, creating opportunities that will drive you forward, facing in the right direction.
And it’s so motivating for people to make profit with pride, to fuel your shared purpose. This isn’t profit with a side of purpose; it’s profit balanced with purpose and people in equal measure.
