Balanced over big

One source of stress as your agency grows can be the sheer size of the numbers.

Especially those you’re responsible for paying.

Even at only 10ish people you could have £40k or so in salaries to pay out every month.

By the time you get to 40ish people that monthly bill can easily be £200k.

It can become really hard to have that big number sitting in your head as a responsibility.

The pressure can lead to over-caution when it comes to growing the business or, worse, ignoring key data about your business because it’s worrying.

The healthier approach is not to focus on the numbers themselves in your daily work. Leave that to discussions with your finance director and accountant.

As the CEO, what matters most in the day to day running of the agency, and your decision making, is maintaining a balance.

Keeping one number in your business in balance with another matters more than the size of the numbers individually.

Just knowing what your wages bill headline number is, isn’t actually that useful.

But knowing what your people costs are as a percentage of your billing income is really useful.

And knowing your average revenue per head is really useful too.

From these you can get a sense of whether you’re running hot and risking burnout, or likely to be losing money.

You can get a feel for when it’s right to recruit, or when you need to double down on sales.

And the target range you aim for, to maintain balance, will be roughly the same at any size of your agency.

So instead of wondering whether £40k or £400k is a manageable level for your salary bill, you think about whether monthly people costs being 60% of billing income is right.

Ratios are your friend in helping you truly understand your business, and keep it in balance at each stage of growth.

The balance of numbers in a healthy agency matters more than the ‘bigness’ of numbers.