10x or 10%

Here's a thought experiment to uncover ideas and insights to make your agency more distinctive — and more profitable.

At first, think in two steps:

1. If you were able to charge 10 times as much, what incredible luxury, service or surprising touches would you add to amaze clients and make them feel the premium of your brand?

2. If you were only able to charge 10 per cent of your usual engagement fees, how could you ruthlessly cut costs, introduce efficiency, or automate to enable you to provide your average clients with a satisfactory basic service? What parts of the service would they be happy to do without for that saving? What are simpler ways of doing things?

Bear in mind these are deliberately extremes. You are not seeking to generate perfectly practical ideas that you'll go straight ahead and implement.

You're giving yourself permission to think to extremes.

No idea is too silly in this first pass. Write them all down without trying to make them sensible.

Now, sift through them and look for the kernel of each idea that could be useful to you in improving your value or efficiency — and therefore margins.

For example you might think of a 10x service of sending a 'meeting truck' to clients homes or offices, like a TV outside broadcast unit, so they'd have an amazing experience on all your Zoom meetings.

If you look for insights in that, you might realise that clients often suffer trying to make apps work on corporate laptops and wifi networks, or their camera and mic are crappy.

You could then impress your top clients now with a 'Zoom pack' of a pre-configured iPad and a 4G dongle that's lent to them while they're working with you. (This is an actual example from one of my previous agencies). It'd knock their socks off that you thought about their experience so thoroughly. It would make your agency more valuable to them.

So, this week, think about how you would 10x or 10% your agency experience.