Case studies
A West Yorkshire digital agency wanted bigger clients but assumed bigger meant hiring first. I ran a full review of how it pitched and delivered, and we fixed the machinery instead. The agency won a £120k financial services project, well above its usual bracket, and followed it with a run of larger accounts across financial services, fashion and ecommerce. Revenue grew while the team stayed exactly the same size.
The agency had a solid book of work but it was stuck at a certain weight. The projects it won sat in a comfortable band, and the bigger opportunities it wanted felt out of reach.
The talent was not missing. The sums were. Bigger projects need slack: time to pitch them properly, capacity to deliver them without everything else slipping.
The obvious answer was to hire ahead of the work, which is exactly how agencies end up carrying salaries for revenue that has not arrived yet. The owner wanted a better answer before signing up for that risk.
I ran the full review: workshops and interviews with the team, then the evidence, going through systems, processes, projects, reporting, proposals, financials and communication to find where the hours were actually going.
In most agencies the capacity for bigger work already exists, it is just being spent, on proposals that cost more than the fee they chase, on projects that wander without a firm scope, on tools and handovers that soak up time nobody bills for.
The plan came out of that. The agency tightened the delivery process so projects ran to a defined shape with clear ownership, which is what recovers the quiet losses, and sharpened how it qualified and pitched opportunities so effort concentrated on work worth winning. The point was to make the existing team able to carry heavier projects, rather than making the team heavier.
The agency won a £120k project in financial services, well above its usual bracket, and followed it with several large account wins across financial services, fashion and ecommerce. Revenue grew while the team stayed exactly the same size, which is the version of growth that changes an agency's margins rather than just its turnover.
I will be straight about the limits of the numbers: the margin figures behind that sat in the agency's own accounts and the agency stays anonymous here, so the £120k is the one hard figure I can put my name to.
When an agency wants bigger clients, the reflex is to buy capacity. Usually the capacity is already there, buried under leaky pitches and loose delivery. Fix how the work is chosen and how it is run and the same team can hold projects it would have buckled under a year earlier. Hiring is the answer sometimes. It should never be the first answer.
The review behind this is get-gain-grow. On what an agency audit does and does not do, see agency audit: expectations vs reality.
Usually not, and hiring first is how agencies end up carrying salaries for revenue that has not arrived. In most agencies the capacity for bigger work already exists; it is being spent on proposals that cost more than the fee they chase and on projects that wander without a firm scope.
Two things. The delivery process was tightened so projects ran to a defined shape with clear ownership, which is what recovers the quiet losses. And the way opportunities were qualified and pitched was sharpened, so effort concentrated on work worth winning.
It is the get-gain-grow review, scoped and fixed before it starts, from £5,000. That covers the workshops, the interviews, the evidence pass, the written report and the prioritised plan.
Most clients begin with a conversation. No pitch, no hard sell.
Just a straightforward discussion about where you are and whether I can help.
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