You’re keen to grow your creative agency. Perhaps you’ve even noticed some increase in the number of enquiries you have been getting lately. You do good work – better, even, than some of your competitors.
Of course, you may not want to grow – or grow too much. Bo Burlingham’s book “Small Giants” addresses how you can be great without being too big.
But if that’s not you, and you really do want to expand, why isn’t it happening? Why aren’t you growing? Really growing, like you know you could be?
Here are the 5 most common reasons that your creative agency is not growing:
Lumpy pipeline
You’re constantly busy. Work is not the issue here. You (and your team, if you have one) are busier than you have ever been. You work nights, Saturdays, middle of the night. Clients aren’t surprised to get an email from you date stamped at 3am, and when someone asks “How was your weekend?”, you look at them rather blankly.
This is all very encouraging – in some ways. But just because your creative agency is busy does not mean that it is profitable. Or growing.
Because you’re so busy, you work yourself into the ground without being able to find sources of new business. You don’t have the time – and let’s face it, you couldn’t handle too much more anyway! You’re on fire!
And then the work dries up. The holidays come and everyone takes time off and stops replying to your emails and suddenly you’re twiddling your thumbs wondering what expenses to cut.
If your new-business-pipeline works like this, you’re preventing your own growth.
Not enough attention to detail
When you began, everything got done on time (sometimes before it was promised), in perfect condition, with no mistakes. That’s why everyone came rushing to you. You were so much better than everyone else because you were new, shiny, eager, keen.
Now the shine has worn off a little. Work doesn’t always go out as promised, and instead of sending off an email to the client, you work on and hope they don’t notice. If they do, you fix the most recent problem first, and do it as quickly as possible.
The solution is to have quality assurance systems. That may sound too complex for your small creative agency, but no matter how small (or large) you are, you do need some version of a system that ensures the work going out to clients is of excellent quality. The more team members you have, the more critical this becomes. Otherwise your creative agency will begin to go the way of many others, with the shine worn off, and you won’t grow.
Too much attention to detail
Some creatives have the opposite problem. Many creative agencies have at least one perfectionist, and some have an entire business full of them. (Most dangerous of all.)
Something that the digital, social, always-online world has done is to help your clients and prospects understand that you are human. If you make a mistake, own up to it. If you have a great idea (or a client does), get it drafted. Facebook has written on their development team wall, “Done is better than perfect.”
As a developer or a creative, this may go against the grain – but it’s true. There’s no such thing as the perfect product, perfect website, perfect advert. There’s definitely no such thing as the perfect Facebook, as is evidenced by the constant moaning and griping of the billions of Facebook users who use it anyway! (Billions. Literally, billions.)
Within your new quality assurance system we mentioned above, give yourself some breathing room.
No transparency
There’s a book called “The Great Game of Business” which outlines how to get your entire team out there pushing for growth.
The authors, Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham, take the view that bonuses are bad. They are like bribes: “Put this extra money in MY pocket and I’ll pay you something.”
This is true for referrals, as well. You’ll notice at My Accountancy Place that if we suggest an app, a product, a company, a service to you, we never take referral fees from anyone for it. If they insist on giving them to us, we pass them right on to you. It’s part of our commitment to only share with you that which is of value to you – not because of what we are going to get out of it.
To help grow your creative agency, share the reason for growth with your team. Provide them with a stake in the outcome. And if they’ve got a stake in growth, then the entire team will work together towards a shared goal. No “bribes” required.
No cash
The number one reason creative agencies fail is that they run out of cash.
We’ve talked about this before. You’ve heard the saying “He’s so heavenly minded he’s no earthly good”? Well, when it comes to creatives, you can be so creatively minded that your business is no good.
You need to manage your money like it’s an army. Imagine each £1 you own is a soldier. This £1 should be out there, fighting for her life, and when she comes home, she should not only be intact, but ready to go out and fight again.
When you start your creative agency, there are always more soldiers, more £1’s to go out and fight. But if there aren’t any new £1’s coming in to relieve the old guard, well, that’s when you start to have cash flow issues.
Why would you not have the new £1 soldiers you need? Because of all the reasons we’ve identified above. If your client spends £1,000 with you, you’ve got 1,000 new soldiers in your Cash Flow Battle. When you do brilliant work, on time and to a good (not perfect) quality, they’ll probably send in 500 more. And then 2,000 more. And over the life of your creative agency you will see more and more of these soldiers coming in from all over the country or even the world.
Okay, maybe that’s a rubbish analogy. We might have gotten so creative with it that we lost you.
The point is, you have to make sure you don’t run out of cash. When you use Xero for your creative agency, it will:
- Identify the difference between profits and cash flow
- Help you track your time so you can see what products are the most profitable
- Send out automated invoices so the soldiers (ooops, cash) come in more quickly
- Point out the specific areas you can and should grow, in your creative agency
Managing your cash can seem extremely complicated, and it can be. But trust us – it’s SOOOO much easier when you use a cloud accounting package. (We recommend Xero)
Your accountant should be promoting your growth
As a final note, your accountant should be actively promoting the growth of your creative agency. You’re creative. New. Modern. If you have an old fashioned accountant who is managing the past, giving you a profit and loss statement 12 months too late, your growth is stunted.
Modern accountants (ahem! like My Accountancy Place) manage your future, too.
On you grow.
