Top 10 tips on how to build a super agile digital agency business

Sadly, we win some we lose lots. Business people don't like to lose deals. But the reality is that we all have to lose in order to be able to learn from our mistakes and amend strategy and tactics to win new businesses and/or commercial challenges.

Unless you're a millionaire or have rich parents, it becomes easy for you to hire people and close business deals much quicker. But things aren't always easy for everyone. Specially for digital marketing agencies.

Few agencies are brave enough to tell you how they overcome their initial barriers in regards to acquiring leads or marketing themselves over the very difficult first two-three years.This is based on my own experience and I am not afraid to confess that I still struggle to grow and get constant business. Read on (simplified version) to find out what I've experienced (and learn) throughout the past few years.

Failure proof your business - following my top 10 tips

1.Have a real mission statement - As Joe Pulizzi explains in his book ( Epic Content Marketing), display it to everyone so that they can see you're a committed person. Also, it will refresh your employees minds and will show others the kind of leader you are; someone who is able to lead and show the way to get clients and creative talents.

2. Be SUPER organised - Being organised isn't enough. In order to be competitive and creative, an agency must have organsational skills in place, otherwise it's a recipe for disaster. Hands up, sometimes I do lack organisational skills,but I am aware of this and constantly working to improve this. If you can't organise a committed team then its chaos guaranteed. Use free tools such as Trello or Google to organise your daily tasks.

3. Be agile like a tiger - Adopt the philosophy of the tiger - agile. Moving super fast is the key. If you fail this step, then the ruthless competitor will pick-up your lead and will take over. Instead, concentrate and win few projects - but, adopt the philosophy of winning all fights. Be very fast.

4. Delegate projects/ tasks - Keep the ones you're good at along with managing new people - and never be afraid to delegate. If you can't delegate, you might as well do everything yourself! Remember also to cultivate awarness and offer meanings to control tasks in order to inspire and support. It takes courage to change the way you do things.

5. Create the right culture - Withdraw the hierarchy labels from your desk/door. Infact, I'd say get rid-off the door. Think like a newly made startup, hold weekly meetings with everyone at the same table. Let your assistant run the weekly meetings. Its a tremendous idea to let a different person to run your weekly meetings. Invite everyone to ask questions or share concerns.

6. Accept ideas from everyone - Anyone internally (and externally) is a potential source of inspiration or creativity. Accept and respect it. Set up digital and physical ideation sessions. Capture them digitally.

7. Be transparent - With the team. Invite your people to share their positive thoughts via internal chat (IM) when facing a problem. This increases team confidence and brings great transparency, for example: everyone in the agency gets to be involved and see everything, from the groundwork to the financials.) With your clients - total transparency will pay off sooner rather than later. For example: show how to save money and time, instead of trying to sell more. This will grow trust and respect.

8. Focus on improvement before innovation - Innovative ideas can be viewed or considered as an app integration or a process. Innovation is based on data analysis,creativity and resources. I often run out of resources myself. The ability to try, test and fail is often reserved to R&D companies who can afford it. The solution to innovate at no costs is to integrate or use your partner's capabilities.

9. Structure and infrastructure - Identify your strength and weakness, for example: internal content marketing, social media integration capabilities- outsource versus insourcing - you can hire a freelance and/or technical infrastructure consultant on project render saving you thousands of pounds/dollars/euros a year. I often see agencies, including my own having just the budget to get new or run the existent marketing software licenses and the hardware ( Hosting, servers..)

10. Bend the business model - tricky one, but again it depends on cash flow and how big your team is. Can you bend your resources and work long hours? Adapt and offer the client to go for 6-12 month project as opposed to hourly contract basis as it requires much more time concentrating on marketing yourself, so the client will pay more in the end.

Conclusion:

To make it work you'll have to work very hard around all these points, with particular focus on point 2,6, 8, and 9 and keep updating your mission statement and adapt to your target market.

To become a successful agile agency you must figure out going forward (early stage) how to adapt when it comes to selling yourself and charging your clients.

Here is (per hour) example allowing you to see and work out time and costs.

Take 52 weeks x 5 days = 260 days. Now include time for your marketing activities, say 85 days per year, plus client visits, paperwork which represents around 60 days and you find yourself with 115 days left. I take 20 days holiday off (if you're lucky) the equation, I am left with 95 working days. Now, I multiply 95 working days x ￡320 (fees) per day to get the annual wages. This could represent 3-4 projects a year. Which makes a total salary of ￡30,400 taxes not included. Not much is it? I am not including sickness or technical issues here. See the picture?

I sell myself high, because I believe if I sell myself low, my clients will think that I am a low quality consultant.

This will increase or decrease their work flow accordingly. So I have adapted from experience and aligned business models, that will drive many of the changes that need to be taken for any independent consultant or agency to thrive.

But the bottom line is, for you to prosper whilst providing high end services to your clients you have to have a very good marketing strategy in place and repeated business.