Consultant

I typically help founders/owners/leaders of marketing agencies who:

Strategy

• Don’t have a business plan or strategy; or have a strategy and it’s not working; or have a strategy and need it to be bulletproof before trying to raise investment
• Don’t know whether they want to sell their business; or they want to sell their business but don’t know what that would look like
• Feel like their vision and values are just a box ticking exercise and aren’t driving growth (they should be)

Marketing

• Need more leads; or need more leads from the right businesses
• Don’t have a marketing strategy; or have a strategy and it’s not working; or have a strategy and need help hiring for/supporting their team if it’s actually going to get done
• Are fed up of wasting money on entering awards that they never seem to win

New business development

• Feel like they should be converting more deals than they are; or are getting ghosted more and more
• Want to sell their services for more money and/or want to overhaul their pricing strategies; or are fed up of procurement taking their margin away
• Rely on outbound and want to build an inbound pipeline; or rely on inbound and want to add outbound capabilities; or have no pipeline and need one

Client services

• Feel like they should be better at retaining clients
• Want to sell more of their services to more of their clients; or their client services team can’t sell, won’t sell
• Are personally dealing with clients and need to hire someone/hire a team/delegate better/get their team to step up and take client management off their plates

People

• Feel like they can’t make their people happy no matter what they do; or feel like their agency’s culture is completely out of their control
• Know their recruitment/onboarding/management/development/offboarding processes aren’t working for them (...or their people…or both)
• Have plans that involve hiring a lot of people in the coming years and they don’t know how they’ll do it

Operations

• Need their agency to be more profitable and want to understand all the levers they can pull; or don’t understand how profitable they actually are and who or what is dragging them down
• Want to add new services to their agency’s offering; or they’ve added new services which aren’t working in the way they’d hoped
• Need to find a management team/integrator/strong number 2 to run the business and free them up

M&A

• Aren't sure whether they want to sell in future; or are hoping to sell and aren't sure what that would look like (who to, for how much and when)
• Are planning to buy or sell and need a transition plan
• Are starting to see the cracks in their current transition plan (either because their people are unhappy or because they're seeing their income disappear as they miss earn out targets) and desperately need a new one.

I’ve had (and solved) every one of these problems as an agency founder and in roles at both independent and network agencies. Sometimes it took trial and error; sometimes I got advice; but eventually I learned that these challenges present themselves in every agency and life is easiest when you’ve already planned for them.

Should I hire you as a consultant or as a non-exec?

We’ll talk through your agency’s situation before we work together and, most of the time, both are options, so I’ll always fully explain the different ways we might work together and what that means for costs and commitments (including how much time is needed from you to make this successful).

In general, a non-executive director might be right for you if you’re a founder/leader looking for:

• Regularly scheduled time with an advisor (often face-to-face)
• Someone to proactively push you (and your senior team)
• Advice at short notice
• Someone who is up to speed with the state of play in your agency before you pick up the phone
• Someone who will use their network to open doors for you where they can
• Someone who’s in it with you for the long haul.

You’re probably looking for a consultant if:

• Your agency has one or two specific problems that you need help solving (or identifying, or understanding)
• You’re looking for a benchmark or assessment of how your agency is doing
• You want someone hands-on to work with your marketing, new business, client services, strategy, people and/or operations teams

You want someone to do a do a job for you, rather than advising you and your leadership team on how to do it.

So this can be a one off project?

Yes. When we talk through your agency's situation, I'll give you options that range from the very short term ("just diagnose the problem and tell me what to do about it") to the very long term ("help me understand what needs to be done and then hire/train a team to do it for me").

Do you do outbound lead generation?

No. If outbound lead generation is right for your agency, I can train you and your team to do it (and feel comfortable doing it), or help you to make the right hires. Teach a man to fish etc.
I’ve worked with outbound business development agencies and usually brought it in-house eventually.
In most cases, my approach involves building an inbound marketing engine over time, which can be supplemented with outbound.

My agency is owned by a network/is a PLC, can you still help?

I’ve worked in independent agencies; network agencies; independent agencies that eventually became network agencies; and agencies listed on the FTSE. Some of the independent agencies I work with have ambitions to sell: I help them to make that transition and navigate the new reality of having a boss.