TL;DR Promethean’s Consulting Capacity: We’re booked for agency consulting clients through the second quarter. If you’d like help in 3Q, please book an intro call early. Effective account retention is a cheat code for agency growth. Four components to effective account retention include: Doing good (enough) work. Communicating the value you deliver. Being enjoyable to work with. Make your clients look good. Key activities that make those components easier include: Track account health....
26 days ago • 5 min read
TL;DR Last call: State of Digital Services closes Thursday, 2/20. If you want to participate, make sure your data is in by EOD Thursday. Uncertainty Is Back: Business leaders aren’t at 2020-level anxieties, but the overall outlook has grown shakier compared to a year ago. Reduced Growth Spend: When clients feel uncertain, they downsize investments in agency-led growth initiatives like marketing, web design, and dev projects. AI Concerns: AI is fueling uncertainty about service offerings...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
TL;DR SoDS: We're live with this year's State of Digital Services Survey! Take the survey and get the full report + an invite to the private highlight review call. If you're missing internal data to do a first-pass benchmark assessment, start with revgen. The first part of triaging revgen is understanding the actual value you deliver to clients. Part two is developing a deep understanding of who you deliver value for (ICP and buying committee). Now, you have the groundwork necessary to...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
TL;DR The first step to triaging an agency is assessment via benchmarking. First, focus on a high-level (not exhaustive) list of metrics you can benchmark against. For revgen, we look at: Revenue growth Hourly rates Rev/FTE New clients Client tenure Client concentration For Operations, we evaluate: Employee growth Utilization rates Project load Employee churn The financial metrics we cover are: Days sales outstanding (DSO) Cash on hand Operating expenses (OpEx) Revgen investment level Margins...
2 months ago • 3 min read
TL;DR Our subconscious is fantastic at working things out if we give it space. Asking a few questions can help leadership teams reframe and break out of ruts. What kind of value would you need to deliver to charge twice as much? What do you do that's valuable, and why do clients hire you? What should you focus on? Stepping away for a bit can work wonders for our businesses. What we trade-off in productivity, we tend to gain in better directionality. I'm refactoring our Revgen Review Service...
3 months ago • 5 min read
TL;DR It isn't easy to tell when an agency's running hot, but we can get a sense of how fragile an agency is with a few key metrics: Utilization: Track it closely; pushing over 90% can turn small problems into big ones, especially in consultancy-style agencies. OpEx/Adjusted Revenue: Keep support expenses in check. Below 20% is lean, above 35-40% burns margin. Cash Reserves: Aim for a few months of OpEx on hand. Your tolerance for risk will guide the exact number. Sales & Marketing...
4 months ago • 6 min read
TL;DR Leadership teams need to know and appreciate the work other departments do. This knowledge and appreciation unlock the ability to be proactive. Knowing what others are working on is easy, but appreciating their work is difficult. Acquihires are great for solving this. Owners should actively manage their leadership team by instituting: cross-functional workshops, leadership retreats, joint goal setting, transparent reporting, and individual check-ins. Another Promethean capacity update:...
4 months ago • 4 min read
TL;DR There are real risks to specializing a digital agency in a narrow niche. Agencies exist because most in-house teams live further down the adoption curve, but that curve shifts, and commoditization can arrive faster than planned for. Building your business on a singular platform or vendor puts you at their mercy for better or worse. We just published a PR Brief on the latest WordPress situation specifically about this. Industries can shift quickly and relying on a specific trend to grow...
5 months ago • 5 min read
TL;DR What the hell is WordPress doing? Take our <5min survey and let us know how the WP vs. WP Engine nonsense is impacting your shop. Many digital agencies have dismal or non-existent support between sales, marketing, and account management. (especially at the big agencies) When you get above 50-ish FTEs and are competing with bigger shops, you have to get more sophisticated on the revgen front. Cross-functional collaboration is a major way to improve your revgen game. Sales can support...
6 months ago • 5 min read
