Effectively scaling a marketing agency depends on a few key factors: who you hire, your project management methodology, and your mission – that is, the goals and values that drive your company and employees.
Beyond these three core elements of scaling, there's also a slew of minor factors that play a role in scaling success or failure:
- Your company's pricing structure
- Employee onboarding
- Branding and industry competition
- Reaching the right customers
- Recurring revenue and client retainers
A Quote from Bluleadz's Marketing and Sales Manager:
Hey guys, I'm Rob Steffens, the Marketing and Sales Manager here at Bluleadz, and today, we're going to cover how you can effectively scale your marketing agency.
The most important thing that you can do is hire the right people at the right time, and put them in the right seats that they're going to succeed in. It ensures them a path that they're going to be able to succeed and grow individually, as well as with the company.
Another important factor is implementing the right business system for your agency—for us, that's Scrum. It allows us to reach our company goals, our individual goals, and our clients' goals on a weekly basis.
Whatever system that you choose, it's important that it's going to scale up with you and you won't cap out.
Final point: you really need to put in the time and effort to create great core values that your whole company can get behind. This is going to allow your new hires to really believe in your vision and start scaling up with your agency.
Hiring the Right People
Your success as a company is directly linked to the success of your people – their personal goals, skills, experiences, and compatibility with the team and culture. Their personal goals should align with your growth goals, or at least mutually-benefit them.
Hiring decision-makers, whether they're the CEO of an agency or human resources, should strive to find aspiring candidates that not only have the skills for the job, but also want to be a part of something bigger. As in, any growing agency with strong growth goals.
The best way to do this is by providing a framework or path for good-fit hires to excel and grow within your company. A marketing master with no drive to grow may not be as good of a fit as an ambitious counterpart with less experience.
This is something that became more and more apparent to the Bluleadz team in 2018, when we hired a dedicated talent manager to find and recruit the best-fit employees for our growing needs.
Beyond simply hiring the right people, it's also important to push them with the right team structure and values. Your company's core values, mission statement, and growth goals should all serve as a rallying point for new hires.
Choosing the Right Project Management Approach
In addition to building a great team for your agency, you'll also have to provide that team the right support and direction to scale. This is the core methodology and project management system you set in place to serve clients.
Whether this takes the form of Scrum/Agile (what the Bluleadz team uses every day) or a comparable approach, what's most important is that you set up the best system for your business.
If you're experimenting with project management tools and software, pay attention to team feedback and efficiency, and don't be afraid to pivot if one option isn't cutting it. Your project management methodology will have a huge effect on your team's ability to take on new projects and clients.
Alex Dunn
Alex is a University of South Florida mass communications graduate and Video/Media Specialist at Bluleadz. He is a big movie nerd, loves (possibly dangerous) concerts and enjoys taunting co-workers with a camera. He's probably seen The Royal Tenenbaums 14 times by now.