Learnings at INBOUND17

TL;DR: That most (>75%) are struggling, while it was not nice to hear, it was definitely comforting.

Pete Caputa, while announcing Databox’s agency partner program, points out here: 

“With 250,000 agencies worldwide, many of them struggling to get over 5 employees (or disinterested in doing so)...”

So why are agencies always struggling or now disinterested to grow (after all every entrepreneur wants to grow, which is why they started a business, isn’t it?) Here’s what i learned while speaking to other agencies:

• Documentation and Processes: Clodagh Higgins (an agency coach) in her session asked how many agencies have processes - 70-80% of the people raised hands. Then she asked, how many of you have ‘documented processes’ - 90% of those hands went down!
   
  • • Agencies are always working to manage client expectations, which because are not documented at the beginning of the project, keep changing.
      
      
    • Hundreds of reporting formats, and at different frequencies. Some want visualizations, some PPTs, some spreadsheets. Some want weekly, some fortnightly, some monthly.
      
      
    • Learning 1: For the first 45-90 days of a project, just focus on documenting and getting a buy-in from all stakeholders on the strategy, brand guidelines, deliverables, acceptance criteria, and number of iterations on a creative (this could be done as part of the sales process), key success metrics.
      
      
    • Learning 2: Document your delivery processes. However hard and tedious it may seem, if you don’t document, don’t think of scaling up, ever.
      
      

Given that all these challenges exist, this is probably why there were a lot of sessions around the theme of how to grow your agency. I am grateful to HubSpot that they’ve built this amazing community of agency partners, who are so open and willing about sharing their learnings, processes and failures. In fact, the successful agencies are even coaching other agencies, which is kind of amazing. There could always be a fear of the agency you are coaching becomes your competitor, but I guess the HubSpot community believes, there is enough room for everyone, and hence, is always ready to help. Which is what makes this community even more amazing!