How to create a commercially focused agency culture
As a leader of an agency, you are knowledgeable about the commercial aspect of your business and understand the importance of making a profit. However, there's a small issue – you may not be directly involved in running the projects, and perhaps you only focus on profitability once a project is completed, which might be too late to influence the outcome.
In order to grow profitability, every team member needs to have the same commercial focus. Increasing everyone's commercial knowledge and making it part of your agency culture is key.
Process and communication
An effective way to bake commercial thinking into your projects is to have solid processes. A set of ‘rules’ will ensure this commercial thinking happens. And the more it happens, the more it comes naturally. You can limit things like scope creep and miscommunication over jobs, give your teams clear information on how long a job should take, and more.
If you want a commercially focused team, you also need to be open about your financials. You can’t hide financial information from people and expect them to want to drive profits. A culture of openness and transparency will really help teams see how their actions affect profits.
Visibility on project profitability
Synergist gives everyone visibility on the financial metrics they need for their role. This includes personalised live dashboard views and immediately available reports. Everyone sees the metrics they need, such as estimated hours vs. hours used and remaining work required vs. work scheduled.
This provides clarity on how many hours someone has to complete a task and when it needs to be done. If a project runs over, you can quickly get to the root of the problem. Was the project under-estimated? If not, is an individual consistently spending more time than their allocated hours? If you can’t see this, you can’t address it.
Having bigger-picture visibility helps everyone make the right decisions, such as which tasks, projects and clients should be prioritised. This is often evolving in agencies, but Synergist’s resource scheduling and Kanban boards allow everyone to keep up-to-date with shifting priorities. Whilst Gantt charts show where a task fits into the bigger project picture and why it must be delivered on time. Your traffic and resource managers can then quickly prioritise which tasks the team work on.
It also reduces downtime. With these tools, it’s clear what people should be working on, so they don’t need to wait until someone is out of a meeting to ask. Synergist's resource scheduling also allows briefs and work instructions to be attached to scheduled hours, so the scope is there, and work can start immediately.
Empowering teams to think for themselves, in the context of having these features to support the right decision-making, encourages commercial thinking and can help team members advance quicker in their careers.
See which clients and project types are most profitable
Synergist allows you to see which clients and project types are most profitable. Often, there is a misconception within an agency that the most profitable client is the one who spends the most money. But actually, if you can see the recovery rate, you may be surprised. Everyone’s efforts are going to the big client. They get their work prioritised, you are more susceptible to over-servicing, and you’re chasing more work from them when really a client you are not nurturing is much more profitable. They might not be spending as much money, but your recovery rate is higher.
Seeing this data and being open to it helps the whole agency move in the right direction, nurturing the right clients and projects. This sets your agency’s overall direction.
"We give transparency to our teams, so they have the information they need to manage jobs properly. Today, designers, art-workers and account managers are knowledge workers, even mini-entrepreneurs, for us. The days of them doing isolated tasks in the dark are over.”
Steve Clark, Finance Director, Tayburn
Zero-tolerance approach to timesheets
What can we say, if you want an accurate view of your costs they are essential. Synergist can help you embed a zero-tolerance policy, as timesheets can be completed in one click straight from the schedule, so there are no excuses!
You can also see when someone has not filled one in. The implications of timesheets are immediately seen across all your reporting, so when you’re looking at things like hours spent vs. estimated hours, it is always up to date.
In summary...
People often talk about a commercial culture and terms like ‘commercially focused’ often pop up on job descriptions, but it’s very hard to give this real meaning if you are not in tune with your financials. To strive for it, you need to be able to see it!
We hope that this article has highlighted some of the key ways that Synergist's agency management system naturally increases commercial awareness in your teams through clarity and visibility. So your agency thrives while your teams do better in their roles and progress their careers quickly. It’s one beautiful big circle of success.