How to budget in your digital agency

I swear nearly every time I hear a podcast or read an article aimed at web agencies, the “feast or famine” cycle gets a mention.

If you haven’t already heard of it, it’s the tendency for web agencies to have a ton of work on all at once, right before a slow period where we struggle to make ends meet. And then of course, a bunch more projects come in, all at once starting the cycle again.

It’s one of those things that too many of us are familiar with. It’s pretty easy to get into a cycle like this, especially as a small team. When there is work on, you need to get it done so you don’t spend as much time networking and marketing.

Then you finish all that work and start trying to find leads again. Because of the lag time between putting the time in and converting leads, it can be a while before you’ve got more cash coming in.

Even if you’re being a good little business owner and splitting your time between sales and actually doing the work, these cycles still seem to happen.

The Budgeting System

Over a year ago I read a book that completely changed the way we use our money. The rest of this post is based around this book.

To be completely honest, this isn’t rocket science. But I think it’s a really important thing totally overlooked by a lot of people and businesses.

At the simplest level, it’s just putting certain amounts of money away into different bank accounts for different purposes. So when something like a tax bill comes up, it just comes out of your tax account. You know you’ve got money there set aside for exactly that purpose. That means zero stress.

That’s the important bit I think. We can all do with less stress. And following this practice makes a huge difference in stress, at least for me.

What blows my mind the most about all of this is how simple it is.

Read about the system we use at the original post on the Content Snare Blog