Whether you’re a smaller agency that needs extra help in delivering a great client service, or a fast growing mid size agency you may be looking at a daunting pile of challenges that need to be addressed and worrying about how you’re going to get them all done.

You may be comfortable doing it yourself, but you may also be thinking about how you can free up time to grow.  One question that you may be asking when pulling your plans together is “Why Outsource Business Decisions to a Growth Consultant?”.

Successful Marketing Agency Characteristics

Successful marketing agencies have a number of things in common:

• They win new business
• They retain and grow existing clients
• They attract the best staff
• They facilitate those staff in delivering their best work
• They provide great results

These tend to form a virtuous circle that drives further improvements over time – the better results the agency achieves for its clients, the more clients want to work with them, which helps them win more.  If you can manage good performance at all these metrics, then why use a consultant?

Without good performance in all these areas, the process grinds to a halt, growth stops, clients leave, opportunities for staff evaporate, and motivation to succeed falls off, and results don’t materialise.

It’s All About Resource

A marketing agency is a vehicle to sell a human resource – the knowledge and skills of actual people.  Whether the agency is delivering search, design, or content, it is people who facilitate this.  From business development through to client services, people need to be able to understand what their role is and have the space to do their jobs.

Of course, resource costs money, and unless that resource can be sold, it’s not delivering profit to the business.

Resource that’s idle isn’t an asset, it’s a liability.

The challenge for an agency is ensuring that the resource they have on tap is delivering maximum value to both customers and the business.

From a purely financial perspective, it’s wise to run at close to capacity, and as a result, agencies often recruit behind the curve (there are exceptions).  This creates a different set of risks – if key people are overloaded, they’re not going to be able to deliver their best work.

Using an External Consultant

Fundamentally the difference between reviewing your business process and functions internally vs outsourcing that work to a consultant is perspective and experience.  External consultants are generally highly experienced working with a range of different businesses, whereas your internal management team may simply try and work around issues even though a solution could be found.

At Ex Fonte, we have experience in working with operations, sales, production and client servicing teams at agencies of all sizes and can help you to identify what needs to be done to impotve while leaving your senior management team to handle their own roles and get through the tasks that need to be done.

So Why Outsource?

Here’s some of what we think are the key benefits and may answer the “why outsource” question:

• Access to skills on a flexible basis
• Additional perspective on key business challenges
• Experience of working with agencies to promote growth.

If you’d like some advice about answering the question, or want to know more about what we might offer, get in touch.  We’d love to talk.