How to Grow a Happy & Healthy Digital Agency

Clodagh Higgins, author of A Happy & Healthy Digital Agency: 6 Pillars to Build a Profitable Business with Ideal Clients and Digital Agency Coach/Consultant for GROWIT GROUP, consults with digital marketing agencies and provides them with the resources they need to make wise business (financial, hiring, and recruiting) decisions. Her company, Growit, targets agencies new to inbound marketing or looking to accelerate team success, analyzes their goals, evaluates current go-to-market strategy effectiveness, and builds strategies aligned with the desired results. Growit has clients in Canada, the U.S., the UK, and South Africa.

In this interview, Clodagh explains that digital marketing entrepreneurs and their employees are two distinct kinds of people. Marketing entrepreneurs open their businesses because they love marketing, marketing strategy, and exploring new ideas. Given training, they may learn the intricacies of sales, marketing, and software technologies, but often have little idea of how to scale, how or when to hire, or even how to evaluate profitability. Employees of marketing entrepreneurs choose to work for entrepreneurs, but they want to know their career paths and the work process . . . and need structure and support to do their best work.

The most prevalent (and deadly) problems Clodagh sees in agencies are:

• Chasing sales and not paying attention to services
• Failing to hire a "traffic manager" when the service department gets beyond around 4 employees.

Clodagh emphasizes the importance of and reasons for a company to:

• Define its 5 core values . . . and post them on the its website
• Understand the DNA of the purchaser and the lifetime value of a customer
• Mine current customers for more work . . . and for referrals
• Time-track services and target 70% utilization of a services team
• Post a page, "We are always hiring," with 5 core values in sentence form
• Make sure that clients are aware of an agency's value add

Clodagh provides guidelines determining expertise, so agencies can offer higher value to their clients . . . and charge more for their services . . . because they are experts. She also recommends several software solutions to help agencies make operate more effectively.

Clodagh believes, "The future of agencies is all in the value and insights that they bring to clients" and an agency needs to remind its clients every single month of the results it has produced.

Clodagh can be reached by email at: Clodagh@GrowitGroup.com or hello@growitgroup.com

The company website, where Clodagh blogs about agency life, challenges, ups and downs is https://www.growitgroup.com/. Her book, A Happy & Healthy Digital Agency: 6 pillars to Build a Profitable Business with Ideal Clients, is available in paperback on Amazon and on Kindle.