9 Factors That Will Drive Long-Term Agency Growth and Profitability
Your long-term success as an agency owner depends on managing the factors that drive growth and profitability. The Prosper Group Growth Driver Audit will transform your agency and drive success by focusing on the 9 factors laid out below.
Managing and growing a marketing communications agency has never been easy. Today, you could make a strong argument that it’s more challenging than ever. The competition has never been more fierce. Client pressures on program performance and the agency’s need for profit to keep pace with talent costs continue to increase inexorably. A recession appears to be looming. And most agencies are facing the ongoing complications of a remote workforce.
On the flip side, there are major opportunities to break through the competitive clutter and propel your firm to new levels of market competitiveness, capabilities and overall performance.
These include a sharper positioning and differentiation for your agency, developing truly proprietary and branded processes for delivering more effective solutions for your clients, more effective marketing of your agency and upgrading your financial model and management to deliver significantly more money to the bottom line.
Prosper Group’s Growth Driver Audit is our proven methodology for helping agencies become more competitive, overcome challenges and take advantage of opportunities. It offers many important benefits to agency owners.
Here’s how it works.
For every type of agency, the factors which drive growth and profitability are the same.
We have many years of experience working with hundreds of agencies of virtually all types throughout the United States. We’ve identified the nine most important factors for long-term success. We call them Growth Drivers.
The Growth Driver Audit is a comprehensive, action-oriented assessment of these critical factors.
There are many benefits for the agencies which know (or learn) how to manage each of these Growth Drivers.
These benefits include:
- Increasing ongoing revenue and profitability.
- Adding measurable market valuation to your firm.
- Enhancing your market competitiveness and brand differentiation.
- Developing a clearer Vision of what you want your agency to be (and aligning your senior team around it).
- Identifying holes in your senior team or service offerings.
- Developing new revenue growth opportunities (such as business sectors, content/audience development or the use of technology/tools).
- Identifying and dealing with critical inflection points in your agency’s evolution that require changes in staffing or operations.
- Addressing issues with your agency’s pricing model, billing, scopes of work and staff productivity that can increase profitability.
What your Growth Driver Audit will cover.
This a partial list of what we will carefully examine for each Growth Driver:
Mission - What are you and your team most passionate about? Where do you have the deepest, strongest category knowledge and experience?
Vision - Why does your agency exist? Are you prepared to achieve it?
Brand Proposition - Do you have a distinctive brand and compelling service offerings?
Leadership - Is responsibility for success shared by a broad team? Are the necessary resources and staff architecture in place?
Structure - Are you most efficiently and effectively selling and servicing the brand proposition?
Methodology - What’s your “secret sauce”? How strong is your IP? Are you demonstrating why you’re the best agency to meet the prospect’s needs?
Business Development - Are you fully leveraging your expertise and capabilities to reach those prospects most likely to hire you for what you know?
Culture - Is everyone aligned with the agency’s vision and mission? Are you building next-generation leadership?
Finance & Operations - How effectively are you managing pricing, billing, scopes of work, client budgets and required investment in the agency’s future vs. short-term profit?
We will first carefully examine your online presence, written materials, presentations and financials. Then we’ll hold in-depth discussions with you, your senior team and selected clients. The process normally takes 5-6 weeks.
Then we present our detailed findings, specific recommendations and action plan which includes priorities and next steps.
Each of these Growth Drivers requires a strategy, leadership and resources. The levels of leadership and resources required vary based upon revenue. Increases in revenue lead to inflection points where you need to re-analyze how you are managing each driver.
Finally, as a separate assignment, we can help you develop a strategic plan which incorporates the Audit’s learnings to identify the key goals, assign accountability, establish timelines… and help you achieve your Vision.
Why choose Prosper Group for this audit?
Your Growth Driver Audit will be conducted by former agency owners, CEOs and C-level executives who have built, run and sold successful marketing communications firms.
Here’s what agency owners are saying about the Growth Driver Audits which we’ve conducted for them:
“Our Growth Driver Audit has become the roadmap which is already turning our agency around.” (Owner of a public affairs firm with $10 million in revenue)
We’ve used Prosper Group’s findings to propel our firm to significantly higher levels of revenue, profitability and talent.” (Owners of a multi-service public relations agency with three offices and $14 million in revenue)
Please contact Alex Halbur, Managing Partner at alex@prospergroup.net or 310-936-3774.
We’re here to help you prosper.
Prosper Group exists to help the owners of independent marketing communications agencies achieve their ambitions and maximize the value of their life's work.
Our team of former agency leaders and owners focus their deep experience on implementing proven proprietary methodologies across our three practices of agency performance, owner exit planning and M&A transactions in order to drive owner and agency success.
To learn more about us please see our Services page.
