Next-level clients

Healthy agencies don't grow by simply increasing the number of the same type of clients. They grow by taking a big step up to 'next level clients' as the agency matures to be able to service them. These clients do bigger projects over a longer-term, and needing more specialist knowledge and skills.

But the agency, and its leadership, need to sense the right timing, and prepare the agency to attract, win, and service these next level clients.

The challenge, support and guidance from the advisory board will be key in doing this.

Objectives

In this session the board will:

• Discuss the agency's readiness to step up to next-level clients

• Identify improvements to be made to processes, culture, knowledge and skills

• Consider the nature of the possible next-level clients

• Provide input to preparing marketing and sales for the step up

• Identify key milestones, and issues to watch for

Pre-reading

People often assume that agency growth looks something like this:

In this imagining, each year the agency wins a few more clients than the year before, and growth is steadily increasing.

But in fact it's much more often something like this:

In this pattern, we see that: