It can be a good thing to have an agency that is growing faster than expected. Maybe you have found your niche or you have managed to get referrals from top-quality sources. You’re doing something right, in any case.
This realization is incredibly motivating and validating. This means that more money is coming in. High-growth agencies often have unique cultural benefits. Many candidates will be drawn to the agency because it offers the best environment for their careers.
Agents that are rapidly growing often offer more freedom for creativity and individual input. It’s energizing to see everyone working hard to make a difference. People who feel freer to be themselves and have more control over their work can thrive in these agencies. They are eager to play hard and work hard.
High Growth, High Risk?
There is a fine line between being a free spirit and following a strict process. If you feel like you are constantly fighting fires that could be prevented, a maverick culture can turn sour. It is difficult to keep the positives of an unrestricted, creatively-rich, highly motivated environment intact without having to rely on others to do the job.
As a small agency, you can work in low-process, reactive, and ad-hoc ways. When you are all together in the same place, you can quickly find solutions and troubleshoot. The more complicated things you make, the harder they will be. If nobody knows who is doing what, how much they are working on it, or if they are fully functioning, the dream team could become a nightmare.
A larger team can lead to bigger or more complex projects. However, this requires a new way of working. Higher budgets and larger projects require more planning and documentation. You will need to manage the increased client communication requirements for these types of projects.
To help build processes and establish support structures, it is a good idea to hire an operations or delivery lead. Even if you have a delivery manager on your team, they will not be able to fix everything. They need the right tools and must prioritize the issues that impact your agency’s growth.
Growing Pains
These are the four most common problems that an agency might face as it grows, regardless of whether they have the resources to find a role for the operational side or if you are the agency leader.
Staffing the right levels
It’s easy to want to hire more people when you’re growing fast. Although it is exciting to add new members to your team, it is also important to understand the additional resources required before hiring.
It is crucial to have a clear understanding of how your resources are being used to make informed decisions about expanding your team. To get this overview, it is important that your team accurately tracks the time they spend on tasks. You can track time entries to see where your team is spending their time and how much they are working with clients. It also shows you which skillsets or roles are over or under-utilized.
These facts will allow you to make better decisions about when you should advertise for new candidates and when you should keep your current employees happy.
You can read our article to find out why growing agencies don’t track their time.
Communication must be clear
Communication becomes more difficult as your agency grows. It’s more common for everyone to participate in every decision or project when you have a smaller team. Maybe you have a daily stand-up meeting that everyone attends. This is possible when there are only seven to eight people. This will change as you grow your organization.
It is important to create an infrastructure that allows people to work together and access relevant information from each other without consuming their time. This problem is not solved by scheduling more meetings, or is sending too many emails.
People are more comfortable using collaborative workspaces that allow them to work in real time with colleagues. Having an online collaborative workspace is likely more than a “nice to have”. Most project management platforms let you comment on tasks and tag others, which alerts them that your attention is required. This makes it less likely that anything will go unnoticed.
Develop processes that can handle the increasing workload
Rapid growth can be achieved by retaining clients or new business through referrals. Either you need to improve your current systems or find a solution. What will your workflow do when you have to track multiple projects, deadlines, and budgets simultaneously?
You might consider a more sophisticated and dedicated solution if your agency is still using spreadsheets. Spreadsheets can be very useful while you are small but they can be quite tedious. Spreadsheets become more complicated as you get bigger. It will also take longer to update them.
It’s simply not a good idea to waste time managing multiple projects simultaneously when there are project management tools available.
Implementing any new software can take time. People must learn the system and data must be transferred. You should make sure that your system can withstand stress before things get out of control.
Maintaining a competitive edge
As you grow, you will likely find yourself competing against other organizations – people who have been around longer than you. You might be more flexible than them, or you may have more determination and energy. You may want to be the one who gets big projects or clients with high-profile names. They will have proven processes.
You must remain competitive to be resilient. To do this, you must work smart and be observant of the numbers. You may not be able to afford a CFO yet so you’ll need to find a way that keeps your financial data available and accurate, without spending hours on it.
You can make managing your agency’s projects easier by using a system that unites financial data from all projects (project budgets and rate cards, retainer fees, etc.) and allows you to pull reports based on this data. Forecast’s advanced analysis feature AvA makes it easy to track agency finances. You can create custom dashboards to provide quick insights into the financial health of your agency, wherever you are.
Scaling up
Your agency will be experiencing a period of rapid growth. Growth requires change. There will be stumbling blocks along the way. These are only a few of the issues you may face. Your organization is unique and you will need to overcome challenges that are specific to you. Sometimes it can feel like you are up against the world. But, when you get to the other side, you will have learned invaluable business lessons that only experience can teach.
Every agency started somewhere. And every agency that scales up has experienced the challenges of scaling up. They each discovered a secret formula to make growth work for them.
This is true for both you and your agency. You might have been five people when you started; maybe you will be fifty by next year. You can make your agency stronger and more aware of the challenges that growth can present.
