The journey of building a second agency in my lifetime while learning from my past experiences but not letting the associated biases cloud my judgement is an interesting task. All of this under the umbrella of our private equity firm is all the more interesting.
While you shouldn’t count your chickens before they hatch, I think there is some merit in pre-empting future bottlenecks which, with almost all agencies, is managing scale. How can you continue to onboard new clients sustainably while growing your team and ensuring everyone hits the ground running?
Finding the right partners
The answer is to find the right partnerships with other agencies or development/design partners. While it seems counterintuitive to work with another agency, it is an interesting way to split the workload and manage client satisfaction and quality of output. Partnering with a team of developers/designers/managers is dependent on finding the right fit for your needs and model. For our purposes, we need someone who understands our subscription-based model with unlimited iterations for clients. More importantly, since I was going to be running point on the development of Moonshot Digital, I was responsible for the structure, culture and experience of the new team.
Thus, I created the following criteria for any future partners that we bring on board:
- Fixed or capped pricing based on services provided
- Validated knowledge and experience executing projects for a variety of clients
- Clear and consistent communication
- Capacity and ability to work within my workflow
- Our ability to align on goals and targets
Price caps are easy to resolve with a partner agency assuming you can give them the guarantee that you will bring in clients. If you bring people customers you often have a lot more leverage than you’d assume. I talked to potential partners about my model, worked out what their maximum fees would be for different offerings and added a nice 10–20% margin on top as a buffer in case some projects or tasks go over.
Validating their knowledge was also relatively easy given the fact that I can personally execute across all areas of the business. I asked poignant questions about digital marketing frameworks, SEO, deep dives into their preferred tech stack and project management.
This brings me to how I assessed their communication. I spent time with them on Zoom calls, Slack messages and task management tools to gauge what their average response time would be and if I can trust their words and the associated actions. I’ve worked with many developers and often they promise more than they can deliver.
The new-ish agency subscription model is quite dependent on a watertight workflow. My internal teams are going to be distributed across the world and in various time zones so our ability to work smoothly and efficiently without constantly checking in with each other is vital. The truth is this is the hardest area to assess without being in the weeds. I don’t believe you can simulate what it is like in the trenches when the work starts to pile up and we are working at capacity but with the right frameworks, you can soften the blows.
Troubleshooting framework:
- Create support tickets for any issues or problems on Trello
- Ensure each ticket has a target resolution date
- Prioritise tickets using the urgent/important matrix
- Integrate Trello to a dedicated Slack channel to receive up to date notifications for each ticket
- Dedicate the first hour of each day tackling support tickets and updating progress reports
Lastly, I want to make sure that the team I work with is aligned with our goals and targets. This is both financial and aspirational. We set goals and anti-goals with monthly targets for revenue, profit, client profile and sectors. Everything is laid out in the open for all of our teams to view with dashboards with progress reports and tickers to see how we are coming along. Over and above that, we will make sure to get on a monthly team call to debrief the last month’s work and a quarterly call to plan ahead. It’s important to stay nimble and flexible here so that we can adjust and tinker with our marketing, sales and strategy just enough to find little wins here and there.
Long-term vision and short term actions need to work in tandem so that we understand our north star but also leave enough room for creativity and sudden bursts of brilliance to come from anywhere within the company.
Until next time.
The Back Pocket:
A new perspective:
Originally published at https://www.khanzain.com on May 5, 2022.
